('Chashmish' is Hindi slang for somebody who wears glasses - generally not meant as a compliment.)
Quite frequently in life, I have either come across mildly insulting remarks at those who are bexpectacled or just plain hesitation in many when they have to wear one. I have never really understood this.
Ogden Nash famously said 'Men don't make passes at women who wear glasses!' In today's context, of course, this might be seen as a remark with sexist overtones and would probably have been greeted on social media with petitions to change.org. At the least, there would have been a litany of complaints from various aggrieved souls.
In my first full time assignment as a Prof, one of my senior colleagues was in his sixties. He obviously needed reading glasses but would strain to read even the attendance register because of his vanity that he would never ever wear them. He had his wish fulfilled unfortunately because he died suddenly, a bit prematurely.
Yet another gentleman who was my colleague for about a decade wouldn't wear reading glasses because they made him 'look older'. Even though he was just a couple of years younger than me (and I am almost 65 now!) he had to maintain the fiction that he was much younger and this was part of his story.
What is it about glasses that excites pity, derision or just hesitation? I really don't know. If you look at the issue dispassionately, it is just a corrective tool for a faculty functioning at less than optimum. It is as bad or as good as say hobbling on a pair of crutches after an accident or using a hearing aid when one's auditory system starts to go.
I can not only happily say that I have completed more than half a century wearing spectacles but that without my glasses, I cannot even see too much! Having had a complaint called amblyopia, I have also had to wear a patch over one eye as part of the corrective treatment for a few months on two occasions. One of these was just after the Six Day War between Israel and the Arabs in 1967 and I even acquired the nickname temporarily of Moshe Dayan, after the iconic Israeli Defence Minister during this war, who had an eye patch.
My spectacles are an integral part of me to the extent that I can't even remember clearly what I looked like without them. I wear them almost all my waking hours and while in school, they enabled me to avoid participating in games, especially as I wasn't particularly good at physical activity. In fact, they helped me look more studious and intelligent than I really was - an impression which got reinforced when I joined the school quiz team ( even today, my repository of gloriously irrelevant information is pretty impressive!).
The picture was complete when I gave second wind to my career by becoming a Prof when I was in my forties as spectacles are almost an essential prop for this profession. They are extremely useful for instance, if one is asked a question one can't answer immediately. Taking the spectacles off, wiping them carefully and putting them back on gives sufficient leeway to gather one's thoughts and helps cover the impression that one is actually stalling for time.
I have also found that it helps one almost literally to get a good perspective on life, maybe not rose-tinted, but definitely one with a photo-chromatic coating!
Quite frequently in life, I have either come across mildly insulting remarks at those who are bexpectacled or just plain hesitation in many when they have to wear one. I have never really understood this.
Ogden Nash famously said 'Men don't make passes at women who wear glasses!' In today's context, of course, this might be seen as a remark with sexist overtones and would probably have been greeted on social media with petitions to change.org. At the least, there would have been a litany of complaints from various aggrieved souls.
In my first full time assignment as a Prof, one of my senior colleagues was in his sixties. He obviously needed reading glasses but would strain to read even the attendance register because of his vanity that he would never ever wear them. He had his wish fulfilled unfortunately because he died suddenly, a bit prematurely.
Yet another gentleman who was my colleague for about a decade wouldn't wear reading glasses because they made him 'look older'. Even though he was just a couple of years younger than me (and I am almost 65 now!) he had to maintain the fiction that he was much younger and this was part of his story.
What is it about glasses that excites pity, derision or just hesitation? I really don't know. If you look at the issue dispassionately, it is just a corrective tool for a faculty functioning at less than optimum. It is as bad or as good as say hobbling on a pair of crutches after an accident or using a hearing aid when one's auditory system starts to go.
I can not only happily say that I have completed more than half a century wearing spectacles but that without my glasses, I cannot even see too much! Having had a complaint called amblyopia, I have also had to wear a patch over one eye as part of the corrective treatment for a few months on two occasions. One of these was just after the Six Day War between Israel and the Arabs in 1967 and I even acquired the nickname temporarily of Moshe Dayan, after the iconic Israeli Defence Minister during this war, who had an eye patch.
My spectacles are an integral part of me to the extent that I can't even remember clearly what I looked like without them. I wear them almost all my waking hours and while in school, they enabled me to avoid participating in games, especially as I wasn't particularly good at physical activity. In fact, they helped me look more studious and intelligent than I really was - an impression which got reinforced when I joined the school quiz team ( even today, my repository of gloriously irrelevant information is pretty impressive!).
The picture was complete when I gave second wind to my career by becoming a Prof when I was in my forties as spectacles are almost an essential prop for this profession. They are extremely useful for instance, if one is asked a question one can't answer immediately. Taking the spectacles off, wiping them carefully and putting them back on gives sufficient leeway to gather one's thoughts and helps cover the impression that one is actually stalling for time.
I have also found that it helps one almost literally to get a good perspective on life, maybe not rose-tinted, but definitely one with a photo-chromatic coating!
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