Naughty Aunties!

Ever since my teenage years I have wanted to turn into the naughty old aunties who with a twinkle in their eyes pinched bottoms, made flirty remarks to the old and young alike, wore low necks with panache and generally had an infectious joie de vivre.

I figured the age to turn into one of these rather loud and border line obnoxious creatures was around 50, plus minus a couple of years. I am still decade and a half away from the ideal age but I find myself getting quite happily into the groove. And I tell you it is extremely liberating!

I have a theory about naughty aunties. One is supposed to live out one’s rebel side when in the young adulthood years but when one is an anal young person with very propah parents/upbringing or to quote my astrological hocus pocus, a kill joy placement of Saturn in Pisces, one does not go through all of that at the appropriate age.

As a young girl I was frought with what is proper and what is not proper issues, along with the usual self esteem, identity, peer pressure and place in society, friends, family, extended family, extended friends – the list is endless. I ended up being a cautious, sensitive, overly idealistic person.

And of course then life happened. Got kicked around in the teeth, picked myself up, got kicked again, picked myself up and kicked back, HARD. And this continues to this date.

All this kicking and kicking back has kick-started the rebel in me. It was after my first break-up about a decade and a half ago that I decided that I would not let one jerk colour my view of what love and life would be .….. that subsequently caused me to be kicked some more :) ..….. but since I had not lived out my rebel-cycle in teenage years like most normal kids do, I turned rebel at this point. I rebelliously stuck to my almost naïve beliefs because somewhere along the way I decided that I would not let others decide how cynical I would be – I would decide how cynical i would or would not be.

This causes me to be an optimist – an optimist who gets kicked around a lot – but a twinkle in the eye optimist, who really believes that things do turn out for the best and that the good truimph's over evil and that if you do good things and good things will do you... and quoting from the immortal line from Seinfeld 'Yada yada yada'.....

Alongside this rebellious sticking to impossible ideals I gathered years (not to mention pounds). The years liberated me from trying to conform to someone else’s stereotype. The pounds liberated me from having to travel economy :)

So the deal is that I am turning into a naughty aunty and loving it. This bit of age has given me a freedom which was not there when I was 22. Take the humour part of it - I had issues on how to react when guys told jokes about how to cheat on women, dumb blonde jokes and sex jokes. Now I just throw back my head and laugh – sometimes at the guys and sometimes at the jokes. I could not tell dirty jokes to my male colleagues. I can now and i laugh heartily at them even though it seems that my poor colleagues are embarrassed. In my younger years I did not use swear words. I *(&#^@ do that quite *#^(&@ easily. And my views – Oh dear! I had mild political, social, religious views in my younger years and now it seems they are getting stronger and stronger and I do not stand on ceremony if I get into a discussion regarding these. And discussion, thankfully I don’t get into too many of those anymore – specially with people who make controversial statements just to get noticed or to get a rize out of you. Also i seem to suffer fools much less gladly now. Seems I had a particular quota of fools and now it full and there is no room to listen to anybodies idiosyncrasies any more. Things that incensed me in my twenties, don’t turn me nuts now. Most importantly priorities have crystallized. Have somewhat figured out that life is going happen and all depends how I deal with it.

Je suis digressez from ze issue…..

Coming back to my theory – Naughty aunties and wanna-be naughty aunties like me are living out their teenage in their middle age. This gives them an unique advantage of having all the benefits of middle age as well as teen-age years without the disadvantages of either. It gives them a youthful outlook, with the ability to look at the brighter side of life andlaugh more easily. It gives them a sharp tongue along the wisdom of when to hold it and when to let it go. It gives them the ability to look and accept the grey along with the earlier black and white vision of idealistic youth. It give them wrinkles which add to the twinkle in their older wiser eyes.

Ah yes naughty aunties, I am going to join your ranks!

Disney Land of Self

Warning: This entry may test the stomach of most strong philosophical gush-mush resistant people!


Are’nt insecurities supposed to fade with age? Are’nt we supposed to resolve our ego issues and personality issues at some point or the other and reach a stage of Personal Nirvana?

Personal Nirvana seems to me the Disney Land of Self. Where all ego’s, insecurities, inferiorities, superiorities, meanness, jealousies, pettiness would dissipate in a parade of self-awareness, contentment, peace, calm, tranquility and the best thing of all, mundane almost boringly consistent happiness.

Rather foolishly I always thought that this was supposed to happen when one matures quite naturally - that the immature jerks would grow up, that the mean cats would realize how silly they were, that the goof’s and goons, and idiots would reform and become decent human beings……..And that similarly the jerk, the cat and idiot in me would also just disappear.

Hmmmmm…… Time seems to be telling me that this is not quite what happens so easily in reality. And worse of all is when you realize that you are one of the scores of people who have not reached their Personal Nirvana even though you have officially entered the Age of Maturity – which of course is different for different people but which for me was somewhere in my early thirties.

I had always assumed that I would reach Personal Nirvana quite naturally. Didn’t you? Self-evolvement is supposed to be natural and that is what we are supposed to achieve in this shitty life. Maybe I have read too many romantic novels. Maybe because my Moon is Aquarius and my Saturn is in Pisces that I have these illusions of grandeur. Anyway, bottom-line, have not reached the Disney Land of Self as yet.

My friends and family also seem to be on the same boat. Earlier on I thought that marriage was the big toll plaza one had to cross, and once one had paid the dues at the toll plaza, one was guaranteed entry. Unfortunately not so. My dearest friend has married a perennially immature man, whose anthem is Bryan Adam’s 18 till I die. Now even after kids, he is as idiotic as he was fifteen years ago. Another friend who got married very young to someone who at that stage seemed to be quite advanced on the Personal Nirvana scale, has seen a shocking slide down for the worst. Another friend has completely gone off the charts. The list goes on and on.

So what prevents us from achieving this Personal Nirvana? Is it Ego or Is it Insecurities? Methinks both are one and the same thing – ‘coz the only reason to think that one is great is the fear that others don’t think one is great enough 

One also has a quota of petty grievances, jealousies, idiosyncrasies and stupidities which don’t seem to lessen, just seem to be replaced by new and improved grievances, jealousies and idiosyncrasies......


Keeping all of this in mind, does one give up on reaching the Disney Land of Self? Is it just too idealistic and self-congratulatory to think that one could reach there at all? Don’t know that answers to these.

However have decided that for me, in these circumstances in which it is clear that one is clearly stupid/immature/silly/petty/insecure, the best one can do is to try and keep a grip on how stupid/immature/silly/petty/insecure one is going to be, with whom, for how long and for what purpose.

Wish me luck!