These days, I am not writing, but reading, and only reading. The ongoing read is ‘The picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde. Got struck with the sentence ‘Youth! Youth!There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth’; the context reverberates with the overtones of Hedonism which professes that pleasure is the only principle in life.

It halted my read, instantly setting my mind pastward,a ‘pastophilic (with utmost humility taking the liberty of coining this usage) that I have been. Even when thirty, I couldn’t help getting gripped with the sensibility of constantly diminishing youth. Those melancholic moments have amply come alive because they had been embodied in a few verses.

Sharing them here at my own peril- I know the world has changed, increasingly characterised by man’s endeavour to celebrate aging, ‘greying gracefully’, reinventing the self in midlife’ and ‘youth is all about mind, not body’ being the new defining Mantras.

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