Fifty-eeesh calling: Randoms are now asking, when are you due to retire? But I think 50 is the new 25

Swati Deshpande is a senior editor at The Times of India, Mumbai, where she has been covering courts for over a decade. If she is not writing about sensitive legal situations concerning personal relationships or reading complex criminal minds, she is taking her readers through the nitty-gritty of the Indian judicial system with its daily dose of cases that enthral, shock, surprise, often prompting them to think about the larger picture. Get domestic help to help mix a dollop of dark brown hair colour with the developer, schlep it on scalp to cover the roots and look golden again. When all you do is work, and that’s your real quirk, an R word query makes it sound like a countdown to a farewell from an active world. How many think that the 50s is a long fun decade – ok, most places let you go at 58 – away from googling ‘ten best concessional cruises’, with the best yet to come and how many let their life plans and shoulders droop once their kids fly the coop?