Society

The Hard-Rockin’ Seventies

Just seventy years young and it’s time to shape up and party

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The Hard-Rockin’ Seventies
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I’ll be 73 next October. After twenty-six years at an international organisation, I retired at 60. I liked my work and couldn’t wait to go to the office every morning. My posting was in New York and my wife and I had at our disposal that city’s delights: great restaurants, plays on Broadway, opera at the Metropolitan, art galleries, the world’s best cinema. Our children went to Harvard and Cornell. My work took me to exotic places like Cairo and Jerusalem. I had a ball.

Now, let me tell you something. Retirement came as an enormous relief. I was as fit as a fiddle; I was free as a bird. I felt young at 60 and I could do all the things I wanted to. I had a decent pension that would take care of me until death, and of my wife after that. As much as I enjoyed working, I was now looking forward to the second act of my life.

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I had taken evening classes in film production at NYU and when I returned to India, I settled in Mumbai and finished a screenplay. I showed it to various friends in Bollywood as well as influential producers they knew. Unfortunately, no one liked it, absolutely no one. Trends had changed while I was away; multiplexes had come up. That was okay. I had other tricks up my sleeve.

I moved to Delhi where I should have settled in the first place. I did a newspaper column, Flotsam and Jetsam, which took in every subject under the sun. When the editor sensed I was running out of ideas, he asked me to write a column on booze. Now, there was a subject I knew something about! The High Spirits column proved popular, even if I say so myself.

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A publisher commissioned me to do a book. Chasing the Good Life sold some copies and got some good reviews, not many. These days I am busy proofing my second book, which will be published in autumn. I am also working on the final draft of a novel, my first work of fiction. Is the novel any good? I have no idea. For all I know, it is a stinker, probably unpublishable. That’s okay too. I enjoyed writing it. If the novel does find a publisher, there will be god-given opportunity for authors I have maligned in my book reviews to get back at me. What fun!

Do I ever get bored or lonely? Where is the time? I write during the day and party most evenings. I hope I make it to the age of 80. I exercise six days a week at a fitness centre to keep my ticker going, I do yoga but I really have no defence if cancer or something like that strikes.

If I reach 85, I would consider it a bonus. Life would be pointless beyond that age. I would have done everything I could possibly have wanted to do. I can rest on my achievements, if any. The unfulfilled dreams would have to remain just that. The children would, by that time, be middle-aged and the grandchildren, teenagers, would begin to find grandpa a bit of a bore.

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I know people who are going great guns in their nineties. Unfortunately, I do not have their genes. My neighbour, Khushwant Singh, is 93 plus and is still a prolific writer and the town’s best wit. In the evenings he is surrounded by beautiful women. Frankly, I find that ridiculous. These women should be hanging out with someone younger and more attractive. Like me, for instance.

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