As hours turn into days and days morph into months and months become years, each birthday brings with it a cake and its accompanying feeling of grease along with the sinking dread of turning older. But hey, the 20s aren’t ALL that old right? We can still pull off the impeccable ‘Plastics’ look from Mean Girls if we choose to and watch Friends all night while upending a whole bag of chips in our gullets and wolfing down a cheesy margherita pizza (large) without any regrets, cause we be young.
When were you a toddler? Oh, in the 1990s watching Powerpuff Girls in the afternoons which was about 10 years ago? Eh, no.
Pause for a minute’s silence as that sinks in.
“But, but where did all those years…” Go? As the new age millennials who still feel young but are also slightly old; let’s be honest, at the age of 18 we thought a 25 year old was practically an old adult doing adult things, the sneaky scampering of devious time behind our backs comes as a shock. They’ve even coined a term for us – OYP – which stands for Old Young People, FYI.
This epiphany means that the ’70s was not 30 years ago and Woodstock happened 48 years ago, which seemed like a great festival where the old uncles and aunties went good ol’ tripping but now it seems like something you’d read out of a history book.
Sunday afternoons, freshly washed and plopped in front of the TV to watch Shaktimaan to the smell of a special Sunday lunch, happened 20 years ago, that’s like 3/4 th of our entire life as of now.
So is our perception of time skewed? No, not really, we all perceive time passing the way we have experienced it. Us turning 27 is the oldest we have ever been and we perceive time as we feel it and it doesn’t really seem very long ago.
We still watch Friends and it doesn’t really look old in any way, a bunch of young 20 somethings hanging out in a coffee shop, uncertain about their jobs, falling in and out of love and the endless craving for food. Yeah that sounds like us. But Friends was 23 years ago and I’m a little torn between lauding the foresight of the directors for making the show as relevant as today or sad about time flying just literally buzzing off on a fucking rocket.
And now we see clearly the collective sentiment behind the “Arey, dekho yeh kitna bada ho gaya!!! Ittu sa toh tha!”, because this is how I felt when I recently saw a picture of the once toothy Darsheel Safary in his new movie who’s drunk a gallon of the growth hormone and looks like a very fine young man. It is I, who is the disgruntled unbelieving aunty in the scenario.
All said and done, it’s how you choose to see it. If 1990 is still 10 years ago, for you, so be it. Don’t let reality play party-pooper when you choose to tell the next generation; “Beta dus saal pehle ki baat hai…“
