SOTTO VOCE
Defying Age

Sadhna, the lovely yesteryear actress, of the ‘Sadhna Cut’ fame refused to be photographed when she felt she had started looking her age. She wanted her fans to remember her as she was at her best. On the other hand, Rekha, the ultimate ‘diva’ actually managed to turn time around (how? HOW??), almost as easily as one would invert a sand clock. And with her ‘exclusive’ photo-spreads that appear in the glossies almost every year, she still manages to turn heads and people her age go green with envy. If anything, she looks more fetching by the day. Age certainly isn’t so kind to lesser mortals. The first grey hair is the harbinger of doom for many and we admit to it being the cause for our long faces. We’d do almost anything to turn the clock around, even if it makes us look like the fool of the decade! Recently, a hobby had taken the nation by storm — everywhere you looked you’d see people busily rubbing their fingernails together. Why? Because it was considered a ‘ram-baan’ for greying and the secret behind the flowing black mane of a much-revered yoga guru. Wherever one went — the movie theatre, dentist’s lounge or in a bus or train, avid disciples would be at it, oblivious to strange looks! After all, all is fair in love and war, and ours is a war against age! Thankfully, the entire beauty industry is now with us. In the beginning they’d have us believe that just hiding our grey strands was enough; now they know we need ‘plumped up’ skin as well. They realise our desperation to pause the ‘age’ button. It’s another matter however that a dying-to-look-young friend experimented with a lotion guaranteed to remove crow’s feet and found it to be more effective than it claimed. She ended up with a huge swollen eye. Her mild-mannered hubby is still to forgive her for the looks he got for that. Is this curious ‘age-o-phobia’ only India-specific? Look at our major motivator — Bollywood — downwards from Dev Saab. Have you ever seen anybody sporting grey hair unless it’s for a role? We don’t have any Sean Connery or Richard Gere who have gone grey quite happily, in spite of being in showbiz. However, in our movie-mad nation, where the line between reel and real is happily blurred, we go on searching tirelessly for the fountain of youth.

Madhumita Gupta