The Myth

Authors Note: (no, this is not about Mallika Sherawat)

It has been a good morning thus far – in fact, I can go to the extremes and declare that it has been a great and wonderful morning. I had woken up early and was out of the house at around 6.30AM. I had covered a good distance by speed-walk carrying some weights on a rucksack; after that had run for about 2kms and then closed it out with some real streeetchhhhhheeeeeeeeessss and stomach crrrrunches. As I checked out the results of my hard work, the stranger in the mirror was seriously beginning to look alien – looked fit, a flat stomach (with a little bit of desperate help of Mr. Tummy Tuck) and what looked like lean countenance. An irrelevant thought occurs to me: isn’t it odd that when you admire the fruits of exercise and labor in the mirror, one tends to miss the additional fat and additional chin in the face?

At work, the team had met a milestone and we decided to go out for a celebratory lunch. A few of us are at lunch in a decent restaurant; it was a buffet. In hindsight, I can trace the downfall to that. I am ok through the main-course: I am very conscious enough, just to eat a bit of roti and a bit of that buttery-tasty-rich paneer stuff. Then the disaster strikes as I move on to the dessert area. My will deserts me. The bits have become big bites, in fact long long bites. Seemingly, the amount of resistance one could have in yielding to temptation is indirectly proportional to the triglycerides that traverse through one’s blood stream and lurks for that ultimate coup-d’etat. I indulge in guilty pleasure – dive into that nice ice-cream with nuts and the hot gulab-jamun. Wow, a spoon of cold ice-cream and hot-jamuns is heaven!!!

Oh, by the way, now I know for a fact that under-wear-ad-guy-with-sculpted-abs and a washboard stomach is just a myth. What is certain in life are three – death, taxes and a tummy. Particularly for us special breed of men, who are in the wrong side of thirties; and in the 30+ zone. Yes, at 30+ 12 years, it is.