Good Old Hormones

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"There is no doubt when old age begins. The human body is a furnace which keeps in blast three-score years and ten, more or less.  It burns about three hundred pounds of carbon a year (besides other fuel) when in fair working order, according to a great chemist's estimate.  When the fire slackens, life declines; when it goes out, we are dead.

It has been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the amount of combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year, remains stationary to about forty-five, and then diminishes.  This last is the point where old age starts from.  The great fact of physical life is the perpetual commerce with the elements, and the fire is the measure of it.

About this time of life, if food is plenty where you live,--for that, you know, regulates matrimony,--you may be expecting to find yourself a grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic felicity that gives one a cool shiver of delight to think of, as among the not remotely possible events."

......Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

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Only three scores and ten! God! I'm that already!

So, it is time to record the relative advantages and disadvantages (if any) of Old Age. As is well known, all life (including thought) is governed by Chemistry. And, of all chemicals, it is the hormones that make all the difference between youth and old age. So, let us take the more important hormones one by one and see:

1. Sex Hormone:

Make no bones about it...the major difference is in this hormone. For, man (and less so woman) is ruled by this chemical for most of 60 years (three scores, leaving but ten).

The last word in this matter has been said by Thurber and White in their monumental treatise, "Is Sex Necessary?", a rhetorical question with an implicit answer, like: "Is Life Worth Living?"

This tome has only 130 pages, of which about 50 are devoted to the wacky line-drawings of Thurber show-casing bewildered women and baffled men. Its Preface starts like:

"Men and women have always sought, by one means and another, to be together rather than apart. At first they were together by the simple expedient of being unicellular, and there was no conflict. Later the cell separated, or began living apart, for reasons that are not clear even today, although there is considerable talk. Almost immediately the two halves of the original cell began experiencing a desire to unite again --- usually with a half of some other cell. This urge has survived to our time. Its commonest manifestations are marriage, divorce, neuroses, and, a little less frequently, gun-fire"

But, Sex appears first as late as on Page 68, more than half-way down their treatise, like this:

And now we come to Sex*

with the footnote:

*Are you glad?

I won't be so obtuse about it as T & W, so let me take it up right away.

Sex hormones, all by themselves, contribute to the beginning and end of all confusion in the human mind. Lesser animals are less confused since their minds, if any, are always clear. Take a troop of monkeys for instance...its members  fight it out and the winner takes all till he gets old and driven away by the next HoD...there is no confusion. 

We alone confuse Love, Sacrifice, Happiness, Romance, Art, Literature and Drama with Sex. The last word on the variance between woman and man in relation to Sex and Marriage has been said by G. B. Shaw, the one handicapped by his rather ungainly figure. According to him, it is like the Spider and the Fly. Here is the quote from the last words of Man & Superman:

"TANNER. [continuing] I solemnly say that I am not a happy man. Ann looks happy; but she is only triumphant, successful, victorious. That is not happiness, but the price for which the strong sell their happiness. What we have both done this afternoon is to renounce tranquillity, above all renounce the romantic possibilities of an unknown future, for the cares of a household and a family. I beg that no man may seize the occasion to get half drunk and utter imbecile speeches and coarse pleasantries at my expense. We propose to furnish our own house according to our own taste; and I hereby give notice that the seven or eight travelling clocks, the four or five dressing cases, the salad bowls, the carvers and fish slices, the copy of Tennyson in extra morocco, and all the other articles you are preparing to heap upon us, will be instantly sold, and the proceeds devoted to circulating free copies of the Revolutionist's Handbook. The wedding will take place three days after our return to England, by special license, at the office of the district superintendent registrar, in the presence of my solicitor and his clerk, who, like his clients, will be in ordinary walking dress.

VIOLET. [with intense conviction] You are a brute, Jack.

ANN. [looking at him with fond pride and caressing his arm] Never mind her, dear. Go on talking.

TANNER. Talking!

Universal laughter."

 Let me state my last word on Sex & Marriage:

"Conjugal Bliss manifests after Sex vanishes completely in this so-called Relationship"

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2.  Fight or Flight Hormone

This is a terrible hormone of the youth. One day I was walking along a bylane of Banjara Hills here and watched  two young men in their thirties come out of their Innovas and start fighting with boulders in their hands, everyone  else watching. It is called Road Rage. In my own youth I was puny in body and mind and so resorted to the Flight  hormone. But I did put up an ugly Fight with Professor XYZ, fresh from Cornell and a decade senior to  me in age but perhaps not in wisdom. He was a visitor then to our youthful Faculty Hostel and he and I one  night walked round the Campus thrice, like the Lion and the Unicorn, with Dr PCSK as the Spectator-Quark,  arguing about the imposition of Hindi on non-Hindi States.

At that time I didn't read my Autocrat well and so I didn't know the likeness of a bigot's mind and the pupil of the  eye:

"The more light you pour in, the more they contract"

Now of course, this hormone has dried up so completely that we wouldn't waste that much energy and time. If he  and I were to meet now, he would talk in Hindi, and I in Telugu.

In well-oiled families (of my time), with the husband a decade older than his wife, it was the husband who  would do the Fight & then Flight.

3. Entropy Hormone

No youth is young if he were not disorderly in his lifestyle. One Sunday morning at 10 AM there was a knock on my  door at E-13 of the Faculty Hostel. I had just then woken up and was smoking my Vazir Cigarette coolly in my bed.  I opened the door and found my Ph D Guide (57) and said:

"Please come in, Sir!" 

He did try to come in, but stopped in his tracks. For, apart from the fumes of nicotine and burnt tar, he found there  was No Room for him to sit. There was a Library Chair, a Sofa Chair, a Tea Poy, a Stool, a Table, to say nothing of  the Bed. But all were filled with either books or ash trays or used coffee cups and saucers or worse. He hesitated a  moment and said:

"I will wait for you on the Lawn Bench"

Nowadays, however, half our double bed is for me and the other half for Ishani's 'property'. She comes in at her will  and puts up, say, a nice train with her blocks, and hearing her mom call her for her milk, goes out to the kitchen. By  the time she comes back in a minute, all her blocks would be pulled apart and put back in their box, neatly arranged ...Ishani then exhibits her Train Rage...

4. Fear Hormone

You may think old men fear old age, pain and death. Not true. It is the youth that fear Death all the time. When I was young, I took half a dozen LIC Policies (two survived) fearing what would happen to my family if I died suddenly. 

Now Death has no fear for me. When I get the news that someone my age has died, there is a sort of mild curiosity to know what did he die of, but nothing more. Indeed, if there is any fear left, it is about continuing to live forever  like Ashwatthama who was cursed by Draupadi:

"Thou shalt NOT die!"

Because the chap killed all her sons thinking they were her husbands. I don't know what would have happened  if it were the other way round ;-)

5. Blogging Hormone

This is the only hormone whose flow increases with age, exponentially.

The other day, there was a nice Comment on one of my posts from a Blogger. And, when out of curiosity, I clicked on the thumbnail, I found that the Commenter had two blogs (I have only one, thank God! for you). And when I  clicked on the 'Posts', I found the legend:

"No Posts" 

on both. And when I told this curiosity to my son, he laughed and said:

"Well, I also 'own' a Blogspot of Blogger since a year before I gave you one, but I have yet to start blogging!!!"

No hurry! He is only 31...

Ishani will be the next to 'own' her Blogspot...

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