Oh boy I’m certainly getting old!

20 years ago, there were no touch screen phones. The most excitement a kid could get was getting to play outside with his friends past sunset. Owning a car meant you were rich and watching movies in cinemas every week meant that your parents were cool. The regular birthday party venues were your homes with black forest cake, chips and if you were lucky Coca Cola (or Pepsi) or otherwise juice. The most form of technology in your house was the 21″ TV which had the regular rectangle remote and buttons on the side of the TV in case the remote decided to stop working. Teachers were allowed to hit their students with a scale without getting into trouble and cartoons were funny without being over the top. Jeans uptil your neck were considered cool and the entire world was realising that yes the world might just end before we enter the new millennium. It’s official, if you were born in the 90s, you are considered as old right now.

Let me give you an example of how old some of us 90s kids exactly are – everyone born in the last year before the millennium began (1999) is 14. Which means that kids born in the 21st century have already turned teens. Not a very comforting thought when you think about it. I have never experienced qualms about turning a year older because let’s face it – these years of my life are going to be the most awesome ever. So what happens when you are grinning about being the best you can and a girl of around 7 asks you for the time by saying one horrifying word, AUNTY! You are completely bewildered because in no way could that girl mistake you for the definition of an aunty. Then when you calm yourself down and come to think about it, you realise that there is a 13 year difference between that little girl and you and what else could she possibly call you that would sound appropriate to her?

It’s like what the 20 year olds were experiencing in the 90s when we kids would roam around calling them Aunty and Uncle. Now we know what they felt when they discovered that gone were the days when they could get away scot free with whatever they did saying that, “No we are not adults, it’s the 70s born kids who are adults!” Well to my fellow 90ers, suck it up because soon you will be thrust into that big bad world out there and probably everyone is going to start calling you Aunty or Uncle! What horrors!

Age is a cunning fox. You never realise how old you actually are because technology nowadays can make a 45 year old woman have skin like me (or so the many anti-ageing cream ads claim). But it slowly creeps up on you in the form of these scary and wily things known as responsibilities. And knowing how footloose and fancy-free we have been living free all this while, we decide to run away with our fancy feet. Little do we know that we can now never escape these foxy creatures that come along with age. What Uncle Ben tells Peter Parker in Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility” I’d like to modify that a bit. What Tanya Kini tells her 90ers, “With great age comes great responsibility, so act like you’re blind and you might just avoid it!”