Young Thung Who Cares - I do, I think

“Ready to take serious action against wrinkles?”

I nod my head vigorously and look up from Vikram Seth’s ‘Collected Poems’, and Claudia Schiffer goes on to explain how L’oreal’s collagen bio-spheres (?) plump up skin from underneath to bring about ‘visible reduction in wrinkles’. It’s not that I am wrinkly and crinkly and am in dire need of a face lift. No. Yet, I am riveted by the wrinkle-reducing ads and I find myself wondering if they work or not and what would be the right age to have a laser face thingy that supposedly blasts off the surface layer of skin and brings out pink baby skin from underneath. Am I that shallow? Well, seems like it. Am I ashamed of being shallow? Well, not really.

But it sets me thinking: what marks the mental transition from young to not-so-young-anymore? I used to feel that I was an old hag when I was 25. I have grown half a decade older. I guess the moment I turned 30 I told myself that I am not young-young anymore. I have begun to really grow old. Does that bother me? A tad, I suppose, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it.

I once knew this person who went on and on and on and ………… on about his turning 40. He had churned out a heap of poems and blog posts about this very significant event and I remember being mildly irritated by it. Though, I hasten to add, I understood, as I do now, exactly where he was coming from. It’s his utmost concern about his bald spot and his fading youth that really opened my eyes to the fact that men are equally vain about their youth and good looks as most women are, if not more.

What is it about old age that we foolish mortals dread so? Perhaps, we are afraid of becoming less attractive. And why does it matter if we do become less attractive? Why attract? Instinctually speaking – to consummate that attraction. To procreate. Bleeeugggghh. So man lives just to create and tend to the progeny? Then what of the noble ‘purpose in life’ that us stupid lot so earnestly seek? Your purpose in life is to raise your child(ren)? Sounds very much like my mom.

Are we worried about losing our health? Being dependent on someone? But that is too far off, and what does that have to do with wrinkles anyway? Or does the (beginning of) loss of youth trigger some neurological, biological reaction in us? Are we wired to respond to it and recognize this so we can take preventive actions in time to safeguard our health, if we so desire?

Or is it just that we are so conditioned by the modern world that we live in, that there is this very real pressure to look good and be young with flawless skin and svelte body. If we did not have the media constantly bombarding us with lascivious tidbits of firm female bottoms in thongs and muscular male torsos, would we worry so much about one wrinkle that has not even made its appearance? Now, I am not berating the media for this unbearable torture. Give us more, I say, and for obvious reasons.

At the end of it all, the only person who would be concerned about my growing old is me. Those who love me would love me still; the indifferent and the haters would go on being indifferent and hateful.

And that goes for all of you as well. It doesn’t really matter if you grow old. If you want to have the wrinkles nuked, go ahead. If you want to proudly display them, do. A wrinkle or two on one’s face or the lack of it, ultimately makes no bloody difference. So, might as well NOT have any wrinkles, what? Heh!

The Team Leader

And then he swaggers in. His hair is gelled into spikes that gives his face a boyish charm. An unruly schoolboy wearing a man’s clothes. His niceness that I used to find so appealing now irritates me. He wears it like a mask; he wears it well.

His gait is confident, measured: tailored to emit silent messages of his capabilities, his 'leadership skills'. He walks like a man destined for higher things in life, who for the moment is doing his rounds on the training floor; with a resignation that comes from the knowledge that to get to the top of the ladder, one has to start from the lowest rung. The patience of a saint.

I am suddenly overcome by a strange urge to run to him, land a heavy one square on his jaw and scream that he is a loser, a goddamn fake article. It makes me nauseous.

But I see him flash his trademark fake smile, eyes all crinkly and creasing into two thin slits on his face. He croons, ‘Hello sweetheart, how are you?’, and I croon right back at him, ‘I am good, sweetie, how are you?’. I know now that he is fake. Does he know yet that I am too?

Midnight Binge

Working in a call centre does bring about certain less than desirable changes in the body clock. That is anybody’s guess. Well, I am no exception. When I started out on this job I grew progressively weaker, plagued by headaches and my naturally frail constitution did not help matters. I might be blessed with the tenacity of a bulldog, but not its stamina. The long and short of it all is that at the moment I do not eat, sleep or behave in a manner like normal humans do. Waking up at 12 o clock in the afternoon and groaning about the fact that there’s only 2 more hours left till I have to get dressed and climb into the van is not a pleasant thing to do. And I do that every single day, with no exception even on a Friday.

I have also come to believe that normal hunger patterns somehow wither away like a dried up mass of weeds, from us call center animals. Nobody is hungry at the right time. And we all work when we are supposed to eat, eat when we are supposed to sleep and sleep when we are supposed to be doing something constructive like the rest of the world does.

Like yesterday I came home famished. Normally I find a chicken-roll on the table, I warm it up in the microwave and that should be sufficient for a good night’s sleep. But yesterday, I had the usual chicken-roll and two musambis, I still wanted more. Well, it’s just the excitement of a weekend, I thought. But it was not so as I found out half an hour later. Sleep was not about to bless me kindly until I did something about my drooling tongue and mind. So I shuffled into the kitchen and set about making one of the most delicious meals ever. Yum. A huge, I mean huge heap of steamed, buttered vegetables, 10 cocktail sausages fried to perfection and two scrambled eggs. I ate it all. I mean, I am the kind of person who would consider one scrambled egg to be a satisfying meal, but I binged like there was no tomorrow. I was an animal. By the end of it, I couldn’t move. I could barely drag myself to bed and when I did I found myself unable to sleep again. But I ate. Somehow that made me happy. I ate well. I loved it. I yam luving it. I work in a call center. That my bahaana is.

Musings @ Work

Fraud Prevention has caught my fancy of late. Also Risk Management. I trawl the Net and procure tomes of material, print them out and set about reading. Premise being that the wealth of knowledge that I assimilate now, will be of use sometime in the future - when I chair a meeting or when I make strategic decisions that will have far reaching implications. Heh.

But come to think of it, I am not too sure about the wisdom of my choice. Fraud – if I knew how to suspect and uncover ‘deliberate actions with an intent to deceive’ I would have kept away from many a persons and watched my back. Risk – if I knew how to manage that, heck, I wouldn’t even be here reading fraud-risk crap and dreaming about something that might happen in the distant future if a lucky shooting star condescends to drop on my head. If only I knew how to assess the consequences and risks of a few actions of yore!

Sigh. Wisdom dawns only when senescence yawns.

Workspace

I don’t have a cabin. Not yet. But I have a great view from where I sit in the office. I can see the sea, machaa! Can it get any better?

I sit facing a huge glass window and the view is fabulous. When I look out through the window, beyond the greenery, beyond buildings that get progressively tinier, the sea is a blue ribbon in the horizon. Sometimes, on clear days, I can even see ships sailing by. In the night, the view is better, especially so out in the balcony. Catamarans light up the dark black sea in pinpricks of light. And when night falls, you are sandwiched by the starry sky above and the dark sea below. It feels as though you are enfolded by two layers of black starry night.

Penis Power

A colleague narrates a story. About a woman in his previous organization who became a victim of the all too common rumour monster. The lady in question apparently had some domestic issues which she openly discussed or mentioned at work. To stay away from home, she stayed back at the office doing extra assignments that she solicited, got herself involved in cultural activities, Fun Clubs etc. And the rumours started. Loose woman, she’s going around with someone in the office, she’s available… I don’t need to explain. The situation got so bad she had to quit.

The colleague who narrated this had finally ended up helping her get a new job so she could get away from the previous office and start a blemish-free life. She would obviously walk on egg-shells, watch her step, be a recluse, and stop getting involved in Fun Clubs and cultural activities. Then she would probably go back to being the cultured Indian woman that she was supposed to be in the first place.

I am not even going to go into what-if-it-was-a-man chant. It would be pointless anyway. What would I accomplish? Who would I change? The most I can hope to gain is to get my frustrations out by talking about it in a blog that nobody even knows about, let alone read.

Maybe about a couple of hundred years later, one might be able to buy ready-made penises. Stick one on your crotch and then you are immune to rumour mills. In fact you would be lauded for your exploits. A woman with a stick on penis can stay back late at work and she would then be appreciated for her hard work, and not viewed with suspicion. If she dances or sings, she would be appreciated for partaking of the pleasures of life. She would not be suspected of having loose morals as long as the penis stays on.

:(

Earlier, blog templates used to make enough sense to me so I could tweak the code and add pictures and backgrounds of my choice. The new blogger templates, while being extremely user-friendly to manipulate what with widgets et al, make nary a sense. I am completely at a loss. Compounding my pain is that fact that there are so many beautiful templates and whatchamallit style sheets online, and I cannot make enough sense of it all to even utilize it for my benefit. Aargh.

Writer's Block

Now it would be posh for a writer to have it, but why inflict that curse on me? I am just your average bored person scribbling nonsense, reading and re-reading it and feeling smug about those literary accomplishments. Not so long ago, I had gotten into the habit of writing at least one page of ‘something’ everyday, every single day, it seems amazing now, how I could manage to do that. Writing a page a day, people, is not easy. It takes dedication and discipline, I don’t think even Shakespeare would have found it easy to write a page a day, regularly and with consistent quality. And talking of dedication and discipline and yours truly… hrrummpph… ah well, let’s move on to the real world.

In the last two years, I haven’t written anything. Well, save for the occasional jottings. I miss writing. And I am losing it. The thought that I am deliberately and stupidly letting go of that skill brings forth an eerie sense of making the same mistake twice. I have let go of too many things just around the time I began to grasp the essence of it, or shall we say, grasp the essence of how one goes about grasping the essence of it, if that makes any sense.

I am older now. My point of view has changed. I have grown, I have become more accepting, forgiving and emotionless. I have become more tolerant and jaded. Trivialities do not excite me any more, even human beings have ceased to be exciting. Now that’s growing too old too fast, but what the heck.

My life will change again, of that I am sure. May not be for the better and I am not really prepared for that. I hope I will have the courage and that I would have acquired enough survival skills to fight it out all by myself, when it is called for. And till that time, I suppose I shall carry on with my old pastime, walk with this friend, pick up where we left off. And we shall fight this WB monster together.