Old enough to Love the Ordinary

on ageing, growing up, and finding love in the mundane.

“Bhalo hoyeche!! But toke aging queer bole dilo re!!! I always thought you were young. Ki shob bolche era!!”

I laughed when I read Mona’s texts. She has been a very dear friend, colleague and support system since 2009 and I had just sent her the video of my recent BBC News Bangla interview on queer ageing, and while she was happy about the interview, she apparently had a rather serious objection to one particular part of the premise: Krish & Ageing? The audacity! 😂

So I replied — “Hahaha I’m young, yes… 😁
But ageing is an eternal process!”

And then I added something that I realised I genuinely meant: “I’ve owned my chronological age by now.”

Ageing and being old, after all, aren’t quite the same thing. We’re all ageing. A six-year-old is ageing, and so is a twenty-year-old… and so is someone at sixty.

And yes, I’m still young. Mentally, I’m probably still twenty-eight. And vanity compels me to add that I would very much like to believe I can still pass for someone around thirty in a crowd where the room is sufficiently dimly lit… 😉

But I also really enjoy saying — “I’m old now.”

I’ve noticed that people sometimes rush to correct me when I do. “You’re not old!”

And I understand why. We have somehow made “old” into something one must resist. Almost an insult. Something to reassure another person they haven’t become yet.

But I’ve realised that when I call myself old, I’m not really talking about the number. I’m talking about something else entirely. And strangely enough, I had tried to explain exactly this to someone only a few days ago, as a part of a longer conversation… So I decided to share that chat with Mona and eventually it became the seed for this journal entry!

On the morning of 1st August, this was written to someone I was briefly considering a relationship with; we ultimately weren’t compatible; nevertheless the conversation produced this reflection. This is what I wrote to him that morning:

“You don’t like me calling myself old. I think my idea of youth was about being reckless or having fun till I drop. It comes from my own life experiences as a teenager or during my 8 years of college life and the unwillingness to let go of that lifestyle. And maybe the heartbreaks as well… Drinking, partying, sex, late nights, pushing the body and mind into doing unnecessary efforts just for fun… Looking for a new adventure every day… It left me hollow and hurt and sad… It left me bitter and grieving… At that time the mundane felt like “old people stuff”. The regular stuff, consistency, discipline, proper bedtimes, monogamy, coming back home in time, having strings attached, having responsibilities, having to take care of people and to be taken care of…

Although deep down I have always wanted that… But because I didn’t get it, I told myself that all this is “stupid old people stuff”… That we need to live a little before we “settle down into the boring.”

So eventually when I started healing and when the body and mind started giving up and when my awareness of my needs became better, I realised that my needs are what I had labelled “old people stuff”. So then I started owning up the old people’s things and became happy with “getting older”.

Mentally I’m still 28 And I would like to believe I can pass as someone less than 30 or just 30 in a crowd even now! 😉 And of course my enthusiasm for adventure is not gone… It’s just that I’ve grown up to know my responsibilities and that I cannot be reckless as I was in the past… I still have a few more things to wrap. A few consequences of some reckless decisions to handle… But I have come a long way! And happily so…

So yes, when I call myself old, I just want to say that I want to live a life that’s disciplined and self loving and loyal and “boring” because of repetition. Not because adventure is bad, but because adventures cannot be the reason to thrive! I want love in the mundane… in the boring… Adventures add spice to life… and yes I do love a little bit of spice in my food… But I cannot fill my stomach (life) with just spices… I need the “boring” for satiety…

And that’s why I call myself old, not because I’m low on energy or not enthusiastic about life… But because I’m more grounded, more responsible, more content with life 😊😘”

Maybe boring isn’t the absence of life. Maybe sometimes “boring” is what life looks like when we’re finally content enough to stop running from one excitement to another.

So yes, Mona. You’re right. I’m young. 😁

And BBC is right too. I’m ageing. But somewhere along the way, I’ve also stopped being afraid of the word old.

Because when I call myself old, I’m not counting the years I’ve lived. I’m acknowledging the life those years have taught me to want.

A quieter life. A grounded life. A responsible life. A life with adventures sprinkled generously through it — but one that doesn’t depend upon them for meaning.

A life where “the extraordinary” visits occasionally… but “the ordinary” is beautiful enough to come home to every night.

And if that’s what growing old looks like — I’d quite like to grow very, very old.

— Dr.  Krish

Journal entry

10th August 2026, 08:30 AM

Later that day I posted the same video on Facebook with a write-up, that I thought I should document here as well

A little moment of joy today.❤️

This afternoon I received the link to this interview where I was recently featured, on BBC News Bangla, speaking about something we perhaps don’t talk about often enough — growing older as a queer person.

When I was first approached for the interview, the interviewer (Pratyush Roy) and I had an interesting conversation about what exactly we wanted this story to be.

We consciously decided that this wasn’t going to be another conversation centred entirely around the grief of being queer.

Not because that grief doesn’t exist.

Queer lives can come with very real challenges — acceptance, family, relationships, marriage, loneliness, visibility, safety, and the uncertainty of what growing older might look like when the conventional templates of life don’t necessarily fit us.

Those stories matter and definitely need to be told. But they are not “the only” stories we have.

So we decided to talk about something equally real:

What if a queer person grows older… and is actually happy?

Because I am…

I have a profession I love. I teach and practice meditation and yoga. I write poetry and stories. I have friendships that have survived years and versions of me. I have family. I have my hobbies that keep me happy and occupied. I have people I love and people who love me. I have built a home and a life that, despite everything it has been through, feels deeply mine.

And somewhere along the way, I realised that perhaps growing older doesn’t frighten me quite as much as the younger version of me thought it would.

Of course, I still hope to find love.

I still hope there will someday be someone beside me with whom I can share the ridiculous ordinariness of everyday life — morning coffee, grocery lists, arguments about what to watch, travelling together, caring for each other when our bodies aren’t as young anymore, and perhaps one day complaining about our knees together. 😆

But I’ve also slowly understood something important:

A partner can become a beautiful addition to a life.

They don’t have to become the condition upon which that life becomes beautiful.

Interestingly, after that BBC conversation, the subject stayed with me.

I kept thinking about ageing, companionship, family, children, loneliness, chosen family — and that peculiar cultural idea that there is only one acceptable blueprint for a “happily ever after.”

Those thoughts eventually became a blog I wrote: “A Different Kind of Happily Ever After.”

It is, in many ways, the conversation I continued having with myself after the cameras stopped rolling. Perhaps because, queer representation also needs more stories where “nothing terrible happens.”

Stories where we work, fall in love, fall out of love, build homes, build a life… where we make friends who become family, care for ageing parents, adopt cats.😆

Stories where we grow wrinkles and laugh and grieve and begin again!

And eventually, we grow old… Not tragically, not apologetically. But simply as people who have lived full, complicated, and meaningful lives.

I’m grateful to BBC News Bangla for giving me the space to tell a little bit of mine.❤️🌈

And if the interview leaves you wondering what my happily ever after might look like… I wrote the rest of that story here:

“A Different Kind of Happily Ever After”
[ Click to read ]

BBC News Bangla feature:
[Video link – Click to watch]

Perhaps happily ever after was never supposed to look the same for everyone. ❤️

— Dr. Krish

Journal entry

9th August 2026, 11:04 PM