Old Age Syndrome - 1

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  http://www.jantoo.com/cartoons/lowres/122/12259283_low.jpg

Most old folks, men as well as women, may not say it aloud but disapprove the attitudes, habits, decisions, dress sense...and most everything about their children. They may boast about their kids to other old folks (who compete with them) but inwardly they feel superior to their kids despite every symptom that disproves them.

This disapproval is like the mother who tells her maid:

"See what the Junior is doing, and ask him not to do it"

If the old fog had married late and got his kid halfway on his way to his pyre, he disapproves silently the unseemly haste which his son (or daughter for that matter) displays for marrying quickly and settling down.

If, on the other hand, he had married early and his son is delaying (or denying) his own marriage, he is quite unhappy about it.

One day when I was sitting on the cement bench of Harrys at IIT KGP and sipping tea, a colleague of mine, Prof X,  of about 55 (as I then was), brought his cup of tea and sat down beside me. And out of civility I asked him about his son who graduated from IIT, went to the US, did a fabulous Ph D in Computing, and was doing what his pop told me was path-breaking work for his firm. And I asked Prof X if his son was getting married (he was into his mid-30s). And Prof X told me that his idiot son was strangely refusing to marry. And when the Father insisted that he ought to have married early, his son apparently quizzed him asking:

"You got married early. What did you get out of it?"

And Prof X jerked his hands in front of him eloquently (he had a stammer) and had replied:

"Why? I got YOU!!!"

Apparently his son wasn't all that pleased.

On the other hand, there was this Prof Y who was sitting glumly one morning at Harrys when I joined him. And I asked him politely:

"Why are you so sad today, Prof?"

And he threw away his cigarette butt and sobbed:

"My son wants to get married"

"What's wrong with that?"

"He wants to marry an Anglo-Indian Christian...he got trapped"

"But you told me that you yourself were a member of the budding Free Love Society in your youth, didn't you?"

"Yes, but I loved and married a Brahmin girl of my own subcaste and an approved gotra!"

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