Age: just a state of mind, or something like it...

Last term, one of the more interesting exercises the class did was in O.B. We were on the eye-roll inducing, but easy, stuff, like 'what do you want out of life', 'long term goals' and how these things evolve with time. The professor then asked us to chart out the amount of time, as a percentage, we'd like to spend on 4-5 aspects (the usual suspects, personal, professional, family, social etc.), and do this in chunks of 5 or 10 years, from now, till the time we'd like to live.

Then we were to compare it with the people around us.

The class was quite for about 5 minutes, and then it became a fish-market. On a side note, methinks the only reason I enjoyed O.B. was that every second OB class was bound to end up in a fish-market !!

The most interesting thing was the huge difference in our thinking. Not in our allocation of time. No, if you knew the other person, you could make a fair guess of his/her allocation. What really stood out was how long we wanted to live !!

I was ready to call it a day at 60, another at 65, but most Europeans went on till 80 or 85 !! We weren't asked to influence each other's points of view, just understand them. Oh boy, did this take some understanding, ha ha.