Their parents had school admissions, parent-teacher meetings, examination results and midnight curfews. I had restaurant openings, fashion shows, first dates, failed dates and the occasional man who disappeared between dessert and the promise of breakfast. They packed tiffins; I plated tasting menus. They waited outside tuition centres; I waited for critics.
Both are forms of parenting. Only one comes with a school bus.
Of course, these young people may simply be glazing me, lavishly buttering me up in a vocabulary their parents do not understand. Perhaps, my aura is not immaculate. Perhaps, I do not possess rizz, that mysterious modern charisma with which one attracts another. Perhaps my drip — my style — is not “giving,” and my latest fit check should have remained between me and my mirror.
Perhaps, I am already unc (uncle) not as a relationship but as a diagnosis. Still, I shall take the compliment. Flattery is a soufflé; prod it too much and it collapses. Age, I have learned, is not merely the number of candles perspiring upon a cake. There is chronological age — the arithmetic of arteries, ankles and anniversaries. But there is also the age of appetite: the willingness to encounter what we do not recognise without immediately condemning it.
Some people become old at 25 because they decide they have understood the world. Others remain young at 80 because each morning arrives as a question. Youth is not unlined skin. It is an unsealed mind.
I have spent my life in retail, restaurants, fashion, music and the arts — industries forever in churn, crisis and costume change. Yesterday’s revolution becomes today’s reference and tomorrow’s retro revival. Hemlines rise, sauces split, songs are sampled and everything we declared dead returns wearing better lighting.
Relevance does not come from chasing every trend. It comes from knowing which winds announce weather and which merely disturb the curtains. We must recognise what was, understand what is, anticipate what may be and protect what deserves to remain classic.
That requires listening to the young.
Not patronising them. Not mining them for fashionable phrases and performing youth like an ill-fitting pair of leather trousers. Listening.
Young people are society’s early-warning system. Their slang may appear frivolous, but language never is. It reveals what a generation fears, desires and refuses to tolerate. Every new expression is a tiny social document, compressed like a spice between finger and thumb.
Consider contemporary romance. Ghosting is disappearing without explanation. Benching is keeping someone available without choosing them. Breadcrumbing is scattering just enough attention to keep hope hungry. In my youth, people did all three; they merely required longer sentences and greater hypocrisy.
Today, an entire emotional crime scene can be described in one word. Dating apps have made courtship crisp, cropped and acronymical. Desire is sorted by distance, age and photograph. A thumb decides whether a stranger enters our future or vanishes from it. We swipe before we speak. We match before we meet. We know someone’s gym routine and star sign before we know the sound of their laughter.
Technology has made connection convenient, but convenience is not intimacy. One may collect matches and remain profoundly unmatched. One may be delulu — delusional enough to imagine that three fire emojis constitute devotion — or be gaslighted into distrusting one’s own hurt. One may develop “the ick” over the angle at which someone holds a fork and discard a human being whose kindness might have nourished a lifetime.
We have become efficient at selection and increasingly frightened of surrender. Yet, I do not blame the vocabulary. Words do not impoverish feeling; careless people do. A short word can contain a long wound. “Ghosted” may be modern slang, but abandonment is ancient. “Rizz” may be new, but seduction was old when Krishna lifted his flute.
Language changes its clothing. The human heart keeps returning to the same party. As a teacher and mentor to young chefs, I see this negotiation daily. A young cook may tell me another chef is “cooked”— finished, defeated — or that someone “ate and left no crumbs,” meaning they performed brilliantly. A dish may “slay.” A culinary legend may be the GOAT. Someone lacking imagination may be dismissed as an NPC, following instructions in the background of another person’s story. I smile, but I also listen.
For if I teach them the patience of tempering spices, they teach me the temperature of their times. I teach them that an onion cannot be bullied into sweetness; they teach me that authority without empathy is arrogance in a taller hat. I teach technique, memory and restraint. They teach speed, audacity and the courage to discard inherited rules that no longer deserve obedience.
Mentorship is not a monologue delivered from a mountain. It is a meal eaten across a table.
The elder brings memory. The young bring momentum. One knows where the road has been; the other senses where it must bend. Wisdom without curiosity becomes a museum. Youth without memory becomes an accident. Together, they may make a map.
Parents and grandparents should learn a clue or two from the language drifting through bedrooms, campuses, kitchens and phones. Not so they can invade every conversation with “no cap” and “main-character energy,” mortifying everybody before the starters arrive. They should learn because comprehension is a form of care.
When a child says they have been breadcrumbed, benched or ghosted, they are naming uncertainty, rejection and grief. When someone enters a “healing era,” perhaps theatre is how pain rehearses becoming courage. When a young person says, “Let them cook,” they may be asking us to stop interfering long enough for an idea — or identity — to become itself.
Every generation creates a dialect to separate itself from those who came before. Then, secretly, it longs to be understood by them.
The tragedy is not that language changes. The tragedy is when love refuses to change with it.
I remain single, although never entirely alone. My life has been populated by students, chefs, friends, lovers, ingredients, melodies and ghosts. Some stayed. Some strayed. Some breadcrumbed, some benched, and more than one vanished with such thoroughness that even a detective might have admired the execution.
Yet each encounter left me with lore — the accumulated story behind a person, a friendship or a life. Lore is what age gives us when it takes away illusion. It is the archive beneath our aura.
I do not wish to be young in the desperate way that fears a grey hair or the honest evidence of survival. I wish to remain young in attention. Young enough to ask what a word means. Young enough to revise an opinion. Young enough to let another generation cook without assuming my recipe is the only one worth serving.
The body keeps the calendar. The soul keeps curiosity. And if the children of my classmates insist that I look younger than their parents, who am I to gaslight them? Perhaps, they are glazing me. Perhaps I possess rizz. Perhaps the drip is still dripping and the aura has not been chopped. Or perhaps I have simply entered my unc era — and eaten it, leaving no crumbs.
Perhaps I possess rizz. Perhaps the aura has not been chopped (Illustration by Suvir Saran) 
Share
