A chicken stew and the edges of time

I turned 60 last month. It did not feel like a big deal, but it's something. I did a self-appraisal and put together some notable changes. I forget things (not everything because my friends and family tell me I tend to repeat bad jokes). My body complains. I don't sleep as peacefully as I did. I don't eat as much as I used to. I can't run as long and swim as far without damage to tendons and muscles. I go to physiotherapy more often than I write this column.

- SAMAR HALARNKAR

There's one thing that hasn't changed though—the time I devote to my kitchen. If anything, my enthusiasm for cooking has grown. I cook more than I used to, my cooking has become more thoughtful and patient, according to me of course, and I feel like I must refine my limited culinary talents to curry favour with my near and dear ones while I can.

My cooking methods were always reasonably healthy. But the frequent kheemas and pork chops of my 30s and early 40s receded in frequency in my late 40s. After a decade of speeding along in the healthy food lane, I learned to ease up this year and rediscovered the foods I had lost to arterial plaque and caution.

And, so, I enter my 61st year realising that the second half of life is all about balance. Don't be obsessive, I tell myself, but also don't be indifferent—be light of heart and joyful in spirit. Rabindranath Tagore put it more eloquently than I ever could. "Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf," he wrote more than a century ago. I like that, the reference to an equilibrium infused with exuberance, flirting occasionally with extremes.