Mid-Life Crisis: An external take

Mid-life crisis happens. So we’re told. Suddenly, at a particular period in your forties, things begin to change: you begin to wonder if you’re in the right job (even profession), covet the neighbour’s wife (or any young thing that travels on two shapely legs), have too many tasks (and desires) unfulfilled, or inexplicably develop an urge to leave everything and move town. Apart from loss of hair and memory, addition of inches and kilos, and a myriad other tell-tale signs, that you’re so often reminded of, rather unpalatably by books, the media and your sons.

Most of mid-life blues, it seems are attributable to you: things happening inside you—hormonal changes, male-baldness syndrome, or plain going dotty. Understandably then, it is suggested that YOU must learn to handle it, cope with it, live it, et al. But it seems to me that not enough has been written about how mid-life crises might be a function of things happening OUTSIDE you, not INSIDE. About how other people, circumstances and events inexorably connive to push you into this unenviable life-stage.

Take work. You’ve laboured a better part of your pre-mid-life at building an organization, a business. Now, without warning, it acquires a life and pace of its own. Other people seem to run it without exactly needing you (thanks very much but why don’t you take that much needed holiday, boss?). Not entirely by design, you realize you’re redundant. Now, I ask, is that really your own doing?

Or, take home. You’ve built a house, assiduously planning and architecting the different needs and whims of each of your children: a music-room here, an amphitheatre there. You’ve bought cars—one for each person, built wealth wisely, not just for your enjoyment but also future generations’. And then, out of the blue, it dawns on you all that’s of no great use, for the kids have grown up and must leave home to seek their own fortunes in distant lands. Is that also attributable to you?

Take your wife. You introduced her to the big city—helped her setup and run her business, taught her the abc of balance sheets, nuances of negotiating, motivational, or even, driving skills. Only to realize that she’s lately become her own person, and wants more from life than just looking after home and hubby.

Or take friends or cousins. You’ve been nice, helpful and considerate all your life. You’ve lent your precious notes, told lies at home, smoked and boozed at grave personal cost and what happens? At this point, all of them are busy—too busy—with their own priorities to think about their buddies.

Not convinced yet that YOUR mid-life crisis is not entirely of YOUR making? Step out into the street and you have a biker screech to a dangerous halt inches away, only to holler, ‘Careful, uncle!’ Or ask for a cardigan in a department store only to face an incredulous look, ‘Er, whassat, granpa?’

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced: mid-life is not a crisis of your own making at all—it’s imposed upon you by externalities, mostly out of your control. And, why hasn’t this aspect been researched or written about? I suspect it’s because most marketers think this is hardly the most fashionable segment (45-60 year-olds) to investigate. Now what can you say to that attitude? Poor youngsters—little do they realize that this is already the hottest and most lucrative segment in the US, and looking at how we’re going, Indians will soon be, too!

Meanwhile, a word of advice to all fellow ‘greyers’: stop thinking your mid-life is YOUR problem: there’s enough evidence out there pointing to everyone else; in fact the whole damn world! So settle down comfortably into it and relax, there’s enough to worry about otherwise: what you’re going to wear on your neice’s birthday party, for instance!

Road Trippers

It’s been almost exactly 2 months since my birthday. And what have I got to show for those 60 days? Well, nothing much, I suppose, until you count the two road trips I’ve undertaken. So what’s so great about a couple of drives you might think? Well, nothing much, unless you count the distance—some 7000 km, done across just 20 days. Which translates into, hold your breath, some 350 km every day, with New Year’s and birthday celebrations thrown in for good measure.

So, what exactly did we do that had all our friends think we were crazy? Driving daily, a distance they normally drive in a week? Well, it depends on how you look at it. You could say driving all the way from Delhi to Goa to spend the New Year’s Eve on a crowded beach is painful, and then driving a car all the way to Bombay again, to be with your son on his birthday, is foolhardy. Especially when you’ve just turned 48!

Why did we do it? Is it because at that age one starts going potty in the head, and becomes completely oblivious to good sense? Or is it because as one advances in years, one become desperate to cram in quality time, especially when it concerns one’s children?

Yes, that was my reason for attempting the first of those trips. Saattvic coming home from Oxford for his winter break and wanting to hit the sunny beaches was certainly the foundation. But far more important was the chance to be together, all four of us, in a car. I reckoned that being thrown together for so many hours would create that much more togetherness, so what if some of those would be spent bickering and shouting at each other!

And, to be sure, that’s exactly what happened. The drive to Goa was warm enough, if you don’t count the couple of the early morning hours we spent getting out beyond Jaipur. And the condition of the roads on the Golden Quadrilateral was pleasantly illuminating, to say the least. But the camaraderie within the car was payment enough for the investment in stiff backs and necks. After a long time, it felt like a great family—just like the old days—non-stop yakking, eating, cursing at truckers who wouldn’t keep to their lanes and so on.

Goa itself was fifty-fifty, at its best if you consider the discovery of Palolem in the South, and its worst, counting the crowds gathered there from all over for the Season’s revelry. Add on the traffic-jams and an unbelievably crowded Baga beach on the 31st Dec, and I’d make that thirty-seventy! The only sad point: the heart-break at leaving behind Gautmik at Bombay on the return trip.

The genesis of the other trip was somewhat different. And the decision to embark upon it almost split-second once we decided to listen to our hearts and not our heads. For an 18th birthday deserves a special present, and that’s what we decided to give Gautmik, no matter if it sounded impossible. We drove his present to Bombay, where he’s studying and took him by surprise, completely. Leaving work, and driving over a 1000 km a day, heading straight for his college in town next morning were all worth it, if only to see his face when he saw us. And spending the entire day with him made it as special for us as, we hope it was, for him.

And now, after those two marathon driving trips if you ask me whether I’d do them again, ‘when I’m sixty-four’, I would emphatically nod and say yes: as long as my wife and sons are with me in a car—any car, on any road. After all, as the family joke goes, we were all truck drivers in our previous births!