In my thirties and loving it...

Dunno if it is my presence that is causing them to behave this way but at least thrice in the last weeks, different sets of individuals on different occasions have wondered aloud if there was life in the thirties.
It is almost as if just by crossing the thirties threshold you have somehow abdicated your right to enjoy life. He may be just about pushing thirty, but friend and colleague Sudhish Kamath has this hangdog expression on when he sighs: ``Just eleven months to go...''. If you didnt know him better, you would have thought he was syndicating his own epitaph.
And then there is this friendly neighbourhood Anupam Kher-type upon whom I tripped one day during my morning jog. Still think it was his irritation at the way I outran him every time he tried to get in my way but he simply had to have this parting shot: ``You are thirty plus now, in a few years you will become like me (shudder! shudder!) and then you will know...''
Still again, there was this saturnine blop across the face of a fellow swimmer when she learnt I was thirty plus (somehow, me thinks, it is this plus thing that makes it even more rib-crunching) and still single: ``I am two years younger than you and my daughter is already in Std. II. What have you done with your life?'' she asked, trying to out-Hagar me.
My life, eh?
And thankfully, I am in good company: even super-successful Shashi Tharoor has had to console his fiftying genes by telling himself, ``Fifty is the new forty.'' And where does that leave me on a comparative scale?
Arundhati Roy understood when she said, ``Thirty is a viable, dieable age.''
Honestly, what is wrong with thirty? Me thinks the number has this beautiful pebble-smooth roundness about it, and suits my Meanwhile personality just fine: I can safely let myself be turned on by both Dustin Hoffman and Aggie Goldsmith.
And you dont have to worry about whether twenty is too early or forty is too late: the thirties offers you a range of possibilities for a range of things, don't ask me what.
What thinks you, reader? Wanna bet on thirties?