Two events this past week, one intensely personal and the other unmistakably national, have brought into sharp focus who we are.
The first happened in a doctor’s clinic, where I sat surrounded by posters on the dangers of a sedentary life, and was told, in six words, that my metabolic age had drifted decades ahead of my own. The second happened on the streets of Delhi and a dozen other cities, where India’s youth, calling themselves cockroaches, forced a government to remove a minister and reckon, however partially, with a system that had betrayed their futures.
One verdict was delivered quietly, across a desk, to an audience of one. The other was delivered loudly, in the open, to an audience of a nation. Both, I think, were saying the same thing : that something had drifted from what it was meant to be, and someone, at some point, has to notice.
While I waited, I looked at the posters showing the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle, foods to embrace and avoid, the seven habits of a healthy heart, diagrams dividing the body into things to repair, I couldn’t help wondering how we have reduced living well to a formal thought rather than a way of life our ancestors simply followed, without needing it named. The science of living has taken over the art of living. Are we the better for it?
I lived with my maternal grandparents while attending my undergraduate study, my parents in Africa those years. The routine was fixed as clockwork. We left before dawn, by five, for the stadium, and returned in time for filter coffee, newspapers, conversation, a South Indian “lunch” that was really breakfast, then off to college by half past eight. Afternoons belonged to sport, evenings to music, reading and an early supper. By eight, the house was asleep.
Sunday was a day of rest, so it was often Saturday evenings we went out. That evening I had gone with friends and returned “late,” by half past nine. My grandfather was awake, asked how the evening went. The usual, I said, a few drinks, dinner, lots of laughs. During the night I heard faint shuffling sounds in the corridor but thought nothing of it. Sunday mornings were always late : filter coffee at eight-thirty, brunch around ten-thirty.
My grandfather looked tired and haggard as we sat down on the portico to read the news. He had clearly slept badly. All well, I asked? Yes, he said. Then, as if waking from a difficult sleep, he said : you know you are nineteen, staying with us to attend college, and your health and wellbeing is our responsibility. I have no objection to you experimenting with substances – alcohol, smoking, drugs – but remember, once on that path it is very difficult to get off. More importantly, it plays havoc with the discipline of the mind.
I was perplexed at this unusual candour, and then it hit me, like a delayed tube light. Oh Tatha (grandfather in Tamil), I said, when I said drinks last night I meant non-alcoholic! I could see the relief on their faces.
Sitting in the waiting room, I recalled that morning and couldn’t help thinking how much simpler life was when the sophistications of living were stripped to the bare. We don’t have to live as hermits. But our mental scaffold can be.
A nurse called my name.
The doctor reviewed my reports and said six words : you are metabolically ninety years old. She assured me it could be reversed with exercise, discipline, and a handful of supplements. Then, almost in passing, she told me she had lost thirty kilograms herself, eighty-six down to fifty-six, and that her own metabolic age had reversed from sixty-five to nineteen. She looked vivacious as she said it.
There are many questions hidden inside a number like that, but the one that intrigues me most is the oldest of them all : is every day of living a day closer to death, or a day closer to life after? My grandparents inherited habit before science. My parents inherited science before abundance. My own generation inherited abundance before restraint, and mistook it for one long party. My children inherited the digital world before they had properly learned the physical one. Their children will inherit intelligence before they inherit wisdom. The cycle has brought us back to the beginning : how does one construct a happy life, and what would my grandparents have advised?
What we have gained, across these generations, is knowledge. What we seem to have lost is wisdom, the kind my grandfather passed to me simply by living it in front of me, morning after morning, rather than by saying it. My children and I inhabit different geographies now. Their children will be more distant still, and I wonder whether they will even recognise the loss, since the wisdom was never theirs to begin with.
Bodies are not the only things that drift unnoticed. It was into this same week that the second event arrived. In May, India’s Chief Justice, speaking of the country’s unemployed youth, had reached for two words : cockroaches, parasites of society. The youth he had named decided to keep the word rather than flinch from it. Within weeks, a movement calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party had gathered millions online and thousands into the streets, wearing the insult as a badge, demanding structural account rather than sympathy. One of their number put the grievance plainly enough to need no gloss from me : if you are born rich, she said, the system dances for you ; if you are born poor, it simply looks away.
The government met them with batons and tear gas, the blunt instruments of a state uncertain how to answer a moral demand with anything other than force. But the pressure held, and by the end of the week the education minister had resigned. A conscience, once named and mocked, is difficult to put back to sleep.
A doctor telling me my metabolic age is ninety is, in the end, asking me to return to discipline. My grandfather would have approved, and added, mildly, that we always knew that. A generation told it was vermin, refusing the label until a government answered for it, is asking something at a larger scale but of a recognisable shape. One reckoning arrived on a single sheet of paper. The other arrived on the streets, wearing a costume it did not choose for itself. Both were asking the same unglamorous question : have we drifted, and are we willing to notice?
The two paths part from there. My own has a short, legible road ahead, exercise, discipline, a decision renewed each morning, its results visible on the next report. A nation’s does not. A movement can harden into a party and gain the power to legislate, at the cost of the clarity that built it; or it can stay a voice in the street, keeping its conscience intact while the news cycle moves on without it. The only question worth asking of either path is whether the anger has been converted into something that can outlive the anger itself, a law, a standing body, a right on paper, or whether it simply waits for the next insult to summon it again.
I left the clinic with a sheet of numbers I did not fully understand and a prescription for supplements I was not sure I wanted to take. Outside, the afternoon had turned bright and ordinary, the kind of light that asks nothing of you. I thought of my grandfather on the portico that Sunday, the newspaper still folded in his lap, saying nothing more about the night before, the matter already closed, already forgiven, already behind him, a man who never once, in all the mornings I lived under his roof, checked a number to know how he was.
I put the sheet of reports in my bag and walked toward the car. Somewhere behind me, in a room full of posters, a woman one fifth my metabolic age was already calling in her next patient. And somewhere further still, in a city I could not see from where I stood, a generation that had just forced its government to blink was already asking what to demand next.