You always remember the first time. The first time you beat a parent at chess, the first kiss, the first car, the first time someone calls you ‘senior citizen’.
“Don’t insult me, I am not a senior citizen,” I told the kindly bank employee who was only being helpful as I stood in a queue to show my patriotism (this being the latest test, according to some politicians). “I am actually only 24, just prematurely grey.”
Well, the second half of the sentence was partly true. I was once prematurely grey but now I am maturely grey. I wasn’t sure just how I should establish my non-senior citizenhood, though. Touch my toes? Run up and down the stairs? Do a cartwheel? Punch the side of the building?
I was reminded of the character in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader , who would rather go to jail as a criminal than reveal that she was illiterate and therefore could not have written the diary on which her conviction was based.
In the end I relented, and to consolidate my patriotism moved into the shade and sat on the chair kindly provided by the bank. I may even have hummed the national song, so filled was I with patriotism and copies of my ID card.
There was a time – as recently as in the first week of November – when people with grey hair spent a fortune on blackening it. Now the traffic is in the other direction. A youngster at the back of the queue disappeared for a while, and returned looking older, grey hair and all. Or I may have imagined it. We senior citizens are like that sometimes.
I wonder if patriotism is divisible by 2000. This is not a philosophical question, but the fact is, I can only buy stuff that is worth that amount or twice or thrice that. A loaf of bread costs 30 rupees, which means I will have to buy 66.6 loaves to be patriotic and ensure that the baker does not have to return any change. Onions cost 13.50 per kilo, so I have to buy 148.14 kilos to retain my patriotism. Of course, I could buy bread and onions from the same vendor, in which case…well, you get the idea. Patriotism comes at a price.
It is possible that patriotism might introduce a new financial practice: Rounding off to the nearest 2000. The Latin for 2000 is ‘duo milia’ (one of the by products of patriotism is the expansion in knowledge), and so we move to the ‘duomilial’ system. Unless of course that is unpatriotic and we ought to say ‘dvisahasra’, which is Sanskrit for the same thing (refer previous parenthesis).
This may be how I went prematurely grey in the first place – digging up nuggets of useless information. In 50 days (one-fortieth of 2000 – I can’t see a number now without dividing it by 2000), life will return to normal. If you don’t believe that, what kind of a patriot are you?
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
