For Whom the (Wedding) Bell Tolls

Have only one mug of coffee every day.”

I obey. I start using a mug that's twice as big.

Alas! There are smarter minds. They call to lower the minimum legal nuptial age of girls from 18 to 16. After all, that paints a much better picture of the statistics on child marriage.

Now, which age are we talking about? Remember the fateful day in class as ninth graders when we wrote down our age in the certificate and inked in a collective lie?

Once again, I'm smart. I remain truthful and instantly age from all my classmates by an average of five years. After all, it's seniority -- till death do us part. Until that happens, we live a life of lies. Wonder if those dates on the tombstone need to be verified through carbon dating.

As for me (five years 'older' than my class buddies), I remain young as I don't pay much attention to my biological age. Then again, once the teeth start to fall off, the mind and the body will have no choice but to connect.

Perhaps this is the very rationale of the camp which is drumming to lower the legal age of marriage of girls -- wary of the biological clock ticking away while the certificate age tries to catch up with the legal age at the rate of one year once every Halley's Comet. There goes our chance to beat the world record of the Japanese woman who turns 114. I don't think we, with all the formalin and the grease, will ever live for 125 years to 'officially' beat that record. The consolation prize? Celebrate the 30th birthday and menopause on the same day.

Yeah, yeah, age is just a number. Picture the (much) older man, the (soon to be) legally mandated underaged wife and the nine kids spread out over 15 years. A family portrait looks more like the signal strength bars of a mobile phone. Turn sideways, jay walk on a zebra crossing and we have the cover of the Abbey Road album by The Beatles. No wait, that's Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

And turning 80 is not to mark eight decades on the planet, but to celebrate the 30th anniversary of looking 80. Now don't go tell this guy to act his age, because if he does so, he'll die.

When it comes to age and retiring, we are the elite SS troupe -- Strictly Sixty. No wonder the nationwide panic when a trailblazing banker and a champion of the poor, aptly credited for his fight against poverty, is shot down for evading the regulatory radar on age for 10 years. Well, at least that tells us at what warp speed the regulator works. And who better to investigate the matter than someone who may well be a hero from the Battle of Plassey. Wonder if Tagore turned in his grave or if Amartya Sen freaked out and refrained from ever setting foot on Bangladeshi soil.

Oh well, the banker's creation has turned from steak to hamburger. Women in poverty panic. Never fear. So that the future woman (now an adolescent at best) doesn't face this predicament, she can now be 'disposed off' two years quicker. For her, the wedding bell tolls.

The writer is an engineer & CEO turned comedian (by choice), the host of NTV's The Naveed Mahbub Show and the founder of Naveed's Comedy Club.
E-mail: mailto:[email protected]