Upon Entering a Gym for the First Time at 50!
I find that i write to seek solace when my mind seeks to salve its wounded self when it has nothing better to think. This week's piece is on my going to a gym which despite its quotidian reality has been a significant change in my lifestyle and work. I now look forward to its continuance and I am now enthusiastically evangelical about its benefits like a new convert preaching to the already converted!
I was told that 40 was the new twenties,
and i wondered whether at 50 i was really 30 as i held myself in disbelief that
i was old (enough) and much beyond the average life expectancy in the first
half of the last century in India. People including those close to my age have
been for a while calling me uncle or chacha (it is soon going to be nana and
dada) and i dismiss it off as a displeasurable greeting. Not that i have any illusions about my
youthfulness or senescence whatever people attribute to my greying and much
bald head and whiskers. At 50 i know my destiny but not the Truth and can still
not follow my heart without wrongdoing. Having been single i have not had the
pleasure of counting the years by ones children’s growth and their declarations
of having ‘grown up’ regardless of what their parents thought. Their desire to
grow up coupled with their ignorance of not knowing what it means to be grown
up is heartbreaking. Being cerebral was merely an excuse to justify that i had
paid little heed to my emaciated body and it conveniently reinforced stupid
stereotypes of being a nerdy professor quite like Prof Calculus. I wore loose
and oversized kurtas that made me look quite like a scarecrow outfitted on a
hanger billowing in the wind and weighing about 48 kilos (mostly in my head
;-)) even into my late thirties. I was as a child barely allowed to play and
would have fitted the Hollywood stereotype of a geeky Jewish boy who could
recite the Torah whole and little else. I was good at no sport and wondered why
people made such a fuss about it. To the way I was brought up, for a long while
i believed that i am my head and that my body a mere appendage to keep that
head afloat and in locomotion. I remember the nightmares that plagued me as a
child when i would cry terrified like Calvin (and Hobbes) at seeing a spiky
head of a demon which was only a ball covered with needles and limbs growing
out of it, living beneath my bed. That probably was my own self image. So with that self image i breezed into my
fiftieth birthday and wondered at my impending mortality as a single man fated
to sickness and in isolation to be noticed in my absence only when noses
crinkle in disgust at the stench.
