To that old geezer, young at heart

The age on your Aadhaar card might be useless. Science tells us that how old your body actually is has nothing to do with cakes and candles

Few things feel more desperate than an old man trying to act youthful. Illustration by C Y Gopinath using Midjourney

C Y Gopinath If you should ever meet me at a party, sooner or later I might quite uncouthly present you with my 2Q set. These are two progressively unsettling questions about your age.

First: How old are you?

It’s a simple question whose answer comes from counting the candles on your last birthday cake. But some will get prickly right here, especially certain kinds of women who coyly demur, “Don’t you know a gentleman never asks a lady her age?” or “A lady never tells” or, more bluntly, “How dare you!”

Second: How old do you feel?

We are now on the shifting sands of psychological age. Young males in their teens or 20s may feel in their 20s but act considerably younger, sometimes even juvenile.

Females of the same age will say they feel ancient and more at ease with men who are a few years older than them.

Somewhere around the 50s and beyond, the clock goes into reverse. As the body ages, the mind panics and begins to backpedal, dreading dementia and senility. You start hearing phrases like I’m young at heart and Age is only a number.

Few things feel more desperate than an old man trying to act youthful. For a long time, I condescended to the view that such people deserved sympathy. But gerontologists have recently begun telling us that how long you’ve lived on this earth may have nothing to do with how old your body is and how old your mind feels.

The new concepts of biological and psychological age are turning everything on its head.

The age on your Aadhaar card might very well be a useless number. Being young at heart might actually mean something.

Some bodies just age more slowly than others—and I’m not referring to whether you have jowls, sagging triceps and crow’s feet. Specifically, gerontologists are looking at something called DNA methylation.

Let me explain this in the simplest way.

You have roughly 30,000 genes, arranged into strands called chromosomes. Every cell has a copy of the chromosomes, and every time a cell divides, the entire DNA is duplicated. However, only certain genes are activated at a time, depending on what the cell is supposed to do. In a skin cell only the genes needed for creating and repairing skin will be on. In a tooth cell, the genes needed to make toes will be inactive.

Genes are switched on or off by a process called DNA methylation. As you age, the methylation becomes erratic and less efficient. In people who lead highly stressful lives, smoke a lot, don’t sleep well and love to hit the bottle, methylation degrades faster. You’ll see them aging faster, maybe dying earlier.

The rate of DNA methylation is one of the biomarkers scientists are using to measure how old your body is, regardless of the candles on the cake.

I will be 71 in two weeks. I don’t feel 71, of course, and I tell myself I do not look it. I get a secret thrill when after much whispering they guess me to be in my late 50s.

When asked how old I feel, though, I am stymied. I would like to answer 53—if only I could remember what 53 felt like. Wait a minute, I do remember—that was the year I got my first stent. I felt like I was at death’s door. I walked gingerly, taking small careful steps. I wore the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

When I’m with people my age, I instinctively call them sir. Most of my peers feel jaded and tired to me. Many of my best friendships and conversations are with people in their 30s and 40s, vibrant, full of questions, no topic taboo.

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In the flow of bonhomie, sometimes I forget not only my age but also the fact that I do not look like them—and they can see it. Sooner or later, there will come an Oh moment, when one of them will respectfully say You first or, worse, ask if I’m okay.

In my 60s, I used to be acutely uncomfortable with my chronological age. My age seemed to have nothing to do with the peppy man I saw in the mirror. There was nothing to be done but blacken my thinning hair and pretend I was Peter Pan.

But now it’s a decade later and I’m thoroughly enjoying my head of salt-and-pepper hair, telling anyone who asks that while I may have lived a certain number of years on earth, that is neither my biological nor my psychological age. Everyone is impressed.

Once, however, this cockiness led to some serious social weirdness.

I was in a Bangkok skytrain when a senior citizen hobbled in. I did what any thoughtful young man would do: got up and respectfully offered my seat to the elderly gentleman, saying, “Please sit, sir.”

He seemed startled. He looked me up and down and then said, with great deference, “No, no, uncle. You sit. Dangerous for old man to stand.”

Maybe you too think I’m your uncle. Well, yah-boo-sucks to you.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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