Withering courtesies

It probably serves us right. With 60 as the new 40 and 50 as the new 35 and so on down the line, we want to stay evergreen. We keep our hair tinted to gleam brownish black in the sun, we spend hours with a trainer or on a yoga mat or in a gym trying to get ourselves aerobically fit and youthfully firm.

And then, when we find that no one defers to our age, they push ahead of us in a queue, make a beeline for the newly vacated seat on the bus and plonk down before we can, or watch disinterestedly while we struggle to put our bags into the overhead space on planes and buses, and lounge on the lower berth while we heave and lever ourselves up to the top berth — we cry foul and call on respect for age and infirmity and a dozen other things (none of which are openly evident) to support our cause!

We also believe in new age familiarity and the way everyone calls each other by their first names irrespective of who's the manager and who's the newest recruit. All those ‘Good morning, Sir' and ‘This way, Ma'am' and ‘Mr or Ms So-and-So' have been replaced by the casual ‘Hello' and ‘Hi' both in written and conversational communication.

We enjoy being one of the guys when we're sitting around a table sipping coffee, keeping up with the times and making sure we know all the latest jargon on the subjects that appeal to those who are half our age — and then suddenly we want to pull rank and be deferred to when there's no place in the elevator and no one emerges to make way for us.

Or we mutter to ourselves about how inconsiderate the young are as they push past you, hardly noticing that they have almost made you drop a burden of papers and books that weigh you down!

At our age our parents were probably fitter and firmer than we are despite never having set foot in a gym or gone for the mandatory morning constitutional - and they were also far wiser.

Good old days

They didn't traipse around pretending to be two decades younger, competing in a business model that has 20-somethings and 40-somethings doing practically the same thing. They had climbed long and slow ladders and people listened to them because they weighed what they said or because they had ‘seniority' at the workplace.

We, on the other hand, often don't wait around for seniority to happen. For us and for everyone else, it's now the fast track. We don't believe in the slow road anymore. So a few years at one place and we do a lateral shift, then another few years and we move again, hopefully, vertically.

Like the rest of the 20-somethings, we job hop when we're just a bit tired of our colleagues or the job itself, we take sabbaticals to unwind or we move into a completely untried and untested program just for the thrill of trying out something new before it we finally hang up our spurs.

We find ourselves, then, as new to the job as a 20-something, and we probably take longer to learn the intricacies of the software, slowly losing ground as we lose steam — finally asking for help.

That's when, suddenly, we find that youngsters aren't so bad after all. Courtesies haven't been withering; they have just been waiting in the wings for us to acknowledge that we need them.

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.