Opinion | Columnists
Antiques gather value while the elderly go unnoticed
Have you been to one of those sprawling mansions where most of the furniture and ornaments have been handed down from generation to generation, giving the home a charming old world look?
- By Cheryl Rao, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:20 December 13, 2008
Have you been to one of those sprawling mansions where most of the furniture and ornaments have been handed down from generation to generation, giving the home a charming old world look? You tend to walk around gingerly, hesitant to sit down just in case the chair your offending weight is nearing is meant to be 'on show' and not really for use. The teapoys also look sturdy enough to be mistaken for stools, but try and descend onto it and see the reaction of your hosts!
Then there's that old wooden chest that, in its day, doubled as a hope chest and jewellery box - you long to open it to see what's inside, but the frown that greets your questing hand curbs any urge you may have had to peep in.
And who could ever think of sleeping in that high four-poster bed with the canopy that came from great grandfather's house? Apart from the ladder you'd need to get up there, what about the look on the face of the owner? That would certainly deter you from anything as rash as to imagine that you can behave normally around antiques.
Furnishing a room with antiques is no longer just for large, old houses. For the truly appreciative, there's always enough place, even in cramped apartments, to tuck in a classic piece or two of period furniture, or if they aren't lucky enough or rich enough to get the genuine stuff, to arrange for copies to be made in the most 'authentic' fashion.
Reproductions
It follows that there is now a booming and regular business 'making' antiques, given the latest yen of the young for the ancient. The same young ones who inhabit these homes, cocky and self-assured, absolutely sure that they'll never grow old, lend only half an ear to the voice of experience sitting in a rocker in the corner.
It could be Grandma or it could be you that is obsolete, something like the use-by-date packaged confections available in the supermarket or the older, scrapped version of everyday gadgets.
As for the other things, it all depends on what they are: Some of the bric-a-brac and the china plates from Grandma's dining set may be put up on display with a light behind it, but the kitchen vessels in which she made all those wholesome meals that made us what we are get dumped in the junkyard.
Imagine cooking without a Teflon coating to minimise the use of oil, lecture the fast food generation! But Grandma hadn't heard of good and bad cholesterol and probably had her first lipid profile done five years ago at some young one's urging - and she still sits serenely in her rocker, largely ignored by the brash fitness-obsessed generation and largely free of the lifestyle diseases that afflict them!
There is still much to learn from her, but the newly adult have no time to waste on listening to stories of a time without the Internet, cell phones, iPods and email. Relegated to the realm of mythology are the entertaining stories they'd heard as children about joint families, cooking on a coal fire, and everything else from an ancient time.
So, while each piece of old furniture, each painting and ornament representing the old arts, is lovingly dusted and polished, placed attractively, noticed when moved an inch out of kilter, the accident prone steered clear away, Grandma stays unnoticed.
Who stops to massage away the ache in her back the way each scratch on the furniture is smoothed out? Who thinks to ask her the story behind some of those same things that adorn the showcases?
One cannot but wonder why older people, the living relics, cannot be treated as antiques are and the antiques just acknowledged as old.
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
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