Seniority is a double edged sword

Over a life spent chasing career growth, the word “senior” has always had very positive connotations. Becoming a Senior Account Executive 30 years back was a day of celebration. While my work was no different from that of the Junior Account Executive’s, my daily allowance during travel had now increased by Rs 25. Also that was the day that Sultan, the office assistant, finally made eye contact and acknowledged my existence, no doubt impressed at the “senior” in my designation. 

 

As life went on and I huffed and puffed up the corporate ladder, I was completely brainwashed to accept that achieving seniority was the path to bigger cars, larger pay checks and so on. When introduced as a senior colleague, one could notice the general feeling of respect that pervaded the room. Attaining “senior management” status was the holy quest for many of us. The word had acquired synonymity with capability, experience and corporate stature.

 

I now find myself at the portal of seniority again – strangely, one that I have not consciously worked towards. From being a plain vanilla citizen, today I become a senior citizen! 

 

I ought to be thrilled at this new level of seniority that I’ve achieved, right? Extrapolating from past experience, I would think a senior citizen will be deemed to be a superior being versus a normal citizen, one whom sundry citizens would flock to for wisdom on how to be a better citizen, how to resolve various knotty problems that an average citizen faces, etc., much as the junior management used to gather around and listen to me pontificate once I crossed over into senior management-dom. However, I’m realizing I’m off the mark by a mile…

 

This new seniority comes with very dubious attachments. Rather than better perks, larger cabins and increased respect, things are rapidly disintegrating. Most activities that were a normal part of life are subject to intense scrutiny by the family. I love driving but now my ability to drive to Pondy without falling asleep at the wheel is a matter of much debate. Changing the 25 kg water can, a job that I used to do with the air of a nonchalant Bahubali till sometime back is now pusillanimously outsourced by my wife to the building security. My son was even putting his foot down on a roller coaster ride recently until I threatened to go on a flash hunger strike. Anything that sounds remotely like fun in my life is a matter for deliberation by an expert committee chaired by my wife with my very hawkish son and my daughter, who, truth be told, while being more inclined towards leniency, is under constant pressure from the brute majority to vote for the veto.

 

The government is complicit too! My driving license expires on a day that is supposed to be a celebratory milestone. I have to go and demonstrate to some random RTO officer that I’ve still got it! And further, I have to prove my driving prowess every five years from hereon. This Machiavellian rule is patronizingly offset by the fact that on my fixed deposits the interest rate I will now get is increased from peanuts to peanuts plus 0.5%!

 

Protests against this sudden and ruthless erosion of one’s rights are not dealt with kindly. My son, post the hunger strike episode, pulled me aside and gave vent to his frustrations. In his view, I was in the worst quadrant of the BCG matrix (X-axis : physical age, Y-axis : mental age). Meaning, I was in reality a senior citizen who was exhibiting petulant, childlike behaviour. 

 

Which has me stumped. The internet, self help books and Milind Soman clearly tell you that you should rebel against accepting limitations. It’s all in the mind, I am being informed. On the other hand, if I violate my boundaries and indulge in anything that is on the exclusion list I have to face the committee and explain my actions. And if I so much as scratch my little finger in the process, consequences are immediate – a growing exclusion list, stricter monitoring protocols and other similar discomfiting steps. 

 

My friends of equivalent vintage appear equally confused. Some of them put on a brave a face and  proclaim that age is just a number. By evening that same fellow is sitting in the bar with his foot in a cast maintaining that you have to listen to your body. I’m sure he would have listened to an earful at home about the sequence of events that led to the cast. 

 

So forgive me if I respond a little lukewarmly to birthday wishes. I am in petulant mood. How does one keep up the quality of life when the world has decided that you need to be under constant CCTV monitoring? Now that our children are grownups, I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling that my wife is rather beginning to warm up to the role of a helicopter spouse. Many of her calls with my son seem to start with the phrase “Do you know what your dad did today????”. And I’m right there in the room…

 

So how am I coping, you ask? Post a phase of life through which I have been a fine and upstanding citizen, the transition from normal to senior citizenship has paradoxically rebooted dormant tactics from my teenage days. Namely, being economical with the truth. The number of pegs I’ve consumed, the number of times I ate out last week, the time I got back last night – there is a correct answer and there is the truth. And if the cost of hanging on to the freedom to indulge in some harmless activities is uttering a few inconsequential lies, so be it. For those who feel squeamish about subterfuge in the land of the Mahatma, let me point out that protecting freedom through nonviolent means is the best tribute we can pay to his legacy…

 

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Omad, 2mad, nomad and other forms of madness

Through my life, I recall someone or the other pestering me to eat healthy, starting with my mother, then my vigilant wife. Now of course, there is Youtube…

But through this journey, the crux was always about what to consume. The “when?” question was never considered worthy of scientific enquiry. In fact “more the healthier” used to be the conventional wisdom in my younger days. Eat 4 - 5 moderate meals a day, snacking now and then is OK. Those were the good old days when hunger was a sensation you could swiftly and mercilessly act upon. And given the very elastic interpretation of what moderation meant to different people, it was pretty much the dietary utopia.

 

Alas, a happy equilibrium is not meant to last in the internet age. Into this garden of Eden, a bunch of nutrition experts started intruding nastily. Having exhausted all permutations of what one can eat, they now came in with a new trajectory of attack. Namely, when you eat and how often you eat! Evolution had not built man, they proclaimed, for so many meals a day. In their jaundiced view, breakfast-lunch-high tea-dinner (with a bunch of snack breaks thrown in) was an artificial construct, brought about by modern living. So what? Would these blokes shut down their Youtube channel and use cave paintings to get their message across?

 

It’s terrifying to see the rapidity with which the absurd gets mainstreamed in the digital world with sundry influencers perennially hunting for the next new thing coupled with the relentless pressure their followers are under to conform to what their role model suggests.

 

I was rudely sucked into this vortex when my wife, having chanced upon one such reel, issued some clear directives. No more snacking between meals. Further, dinner will henceforth be treated as the last meal of the day in letter and spirit, she ruled. 

 

While that was a constraint, I consoled myself that I could live with it and in fact, over time, was able to accept a snackless existence as some kind of a new and a healthy norm. This kind of living, I told myself, would extend my life. OK, the extended life will exclude snacking but the trade off, while dubious, felt like I was at least doing the right thing. My body is my temple, I kept reminding myself, while trying to keep away intruding images of laddoos and similar prasadam items that the metaphor spawned…

 

Cut to a recent reunion of my batchmates. Inevitably matters turned to how someone was so fit and someone else still possessed that full mop of hair and the like. Many were touting something called “intermittent fasting”. I was not initially impressed. The thing sounded suspiciously like the fast of our Tamil Nadu politicians on the Sri Lanka issue or the Cauvery water issue. The modus operandi is that our noble lawmakers have a heavy breakfast and proceed to Marina beach at 930 am. There, a Shamiana will be set up to shield their sensitive skins from heat exposure. Some half hearted sloganeering will follow and by about 130 pm the ritualistic consumption of a glass of OJ will signal the end of the fast, to be followed by a sumptuous lunch. Sheer genius, ticks off so many boxes. 

 

Intermittent fasting though, as I subsequently learnt, was designed to be a little more intense – essentially, two meals a day. 2mad. In one fell swoop, the number of meals is halved, accompanied by a liberal dose of science to suppress voices of alarm and dissent. Autophagy. Fewer Glucose spikes. Lower Insulin resistance. Plus, one evidently has to give one’s gut microbiome some rest and downtime. Seriously? Who would have known that these gut bacteria chaps were also agitating for work life balance! What next? A four day work week or something?

 

I should have steered clear. But making grand pronouncements is a universal frailty and in an unguarded moment, I announced to my family that I was moving to a 2mad plan. I was temporarily gratified by the admiring looks from my family members, but with time, I sobered down and realized I was stuck. I had to make 2mad work for me. Or risk my family’s derision.

 

As I peeled the specifics of this transition from 4mad to 2mad, I realized with a sinking stomach that it comes with very rigid rules. You have to go all in. The slightest transgression will qualify as a meal rendering my 2mad regime null and void. No biscuits, slice of bread, nothing in between the two meals. Not even coffee, unless it is black, no sugar. You see the slippery slope? I observe the growing list of sacrifices with despair. Snacks, coffee, cookies… With each denial, I can feel my life getting robustly extended but without any accompanying sensation of achievement. In fact, the only physiological sensation I feel mostly is that of a growling stomach. And emotionally? They say the gut is connected to the brain, which is probably why my mind feels empty most days as I move around like a zombie counting the hours till the next of my two meals. OK, I lie. Far from being empty, my mind is actually full of thoughts of onion pakodas and jilebis… 

 

Things hit a peak when my son recently announced over the phone that he is toying with going omad. One meal a day. It is incomprehensible to me, but it is apparently a thing with his generation. Where is the world going? From omad to nomad is a short step. But I’m willing to bet that’s going to happen. Nomad is too cool an acronym to let go! Surely it  will be interpreted in a workable manner into our diets! 

 

Many of us were puzzled when India was ranked 102 out of 123 countries in the World Hunger Index. Below even Burkina Faso! Now you know the answer. In fact, I would postulate that in interpreting this index, availability of food to consume is a distant second factor to the degree of traction this number of meals a day scam has achieved in that country…

 

Anyway, adaptation and survival being second nature to man, I have been able to overcome my initial dismay at 2mad and its cruel limitations. Following a short period of crankiness that naturally accompanies unwarranted abstinence, I have now resorted to underhand methods. My house is of modest size, but it has its nooks and crannies where I can create secret spaces safe from my family’s gaze, all capable of storing cookies and murukkus and the like. Plus I have started maximizing official breakfast and lunch meetings. The trick is to ensure no single individual is around for all your meals of the day, so that nobody knows exactly how many meals you’ve consumed. That way, you can maintain the illusion of 2mad to the world, while the true score is known only to yourself. The net upshot is that I’m eating and snacking like before, sometimes achieving 5mad and even 6mad on a good day…

 

I’m not really sure if this is all good or bad, but I’m strangely unperturbed. I have absolute certainty on one thing. They say the world is circular. Food science is even more so! Something that induces cholesterol yesterday is a superfood today. Just ask the much maligned ghee. Bread has been ill-treated too, albeit in the reverse direction. Coffee, chocolate and wine are good or bad depending on the study being quoted. I am positive that someday in the future 4mad will again attain its erstwhile status as the gold standard diet norm. It’s not a question of “if”, just “when”. That day I’ll come out of the closet. Till then I’m prepared to live a life of subterfuge. OK, gotta go. Feeling snacky…

 

 

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