I’ve been wearing spectacles since I was 10. To wear spectacles at that young age is one of the most annoying things to happen. That artificial piece of thing on my body did not please me at all. It’s not like your clothes, watches or caps. There’s a dependency on glasses. You depend on them and you need them. Without them I could not be effective or useful. As a young boy suddenly you’ll feel like you’re a bit physically challenged. It’s never that easy to play any of the sports with the glasses on. I now feel that may be that’s why I was hooked on to chess.

I loved playing cricket. I was never a good player though. I was average at best. I had poor technique and footwork in batting. I was a decent bowler I guess. In fielding, I was hopeless. My wearing glasses did nothing to improve my cricketing skills or form. It’s difficult to bowl with your glasses on. You run the risk of ‘elbowing’ the glasses. So, the underarm and overarm versions of bowling suited me well. While batting, I always dreaded the quicker ball and wearing glasses gave me that unexplainable insecurity.

Once I even had my glasses broken by a hard cricket ball travelling at some speed. May be, if I was a better batsman I would not have put all the blame on my glasses. I didn’t have this thing called ‘hand-eye’ co-ordination. It was so bad that it was like the hands and eyes belonged to different people. My fielding was a joke too. My reflexes were never quick enough to get my palms together for a catch. Especially when the ball is skied up, I used to position myself so well in the zone, only to see the ball pop out of my hand. So my positioning was all right, it’s just that my palms were executing the brain’s instructions quick enough. Not many would realise that when a ball is up in the air, the first feeling you get is to protect your glasses from the falling ball. Easier way to achieve it would be to catch the ball but didn’t I tell you my fielding was a joke?

As a young boy, you had to run a lot. Run in the playground, run to school, run to home, run to the shop, boys don’t simply walk. Running with the glasses on can never be as fast as otherwise. Once again, the awareness of the glass reminds you that you can’t run wild. Holding the glasses with one hand and using the other one for aero dynamic movements was not just good enough. The most embarrassing thing was to see your glasses fall off on the road and then with blurred vision looking around all over to see where it fell. So bloody humiliating it is. Used to feel like a sick old man trying to reach out for his walking stick.

Physical difficulties aside, there was something else too. Bespectacled people were everyone’s bunnies. That was a thing to be made fun of. There’s a range of crazy nicknames and funny one-liners to ridicule the ‘glassers’. By the way, there is no single simple word in English for a bespectacled man. And I don’t want to keep writing this word ‘bepsetcalced’ word because the letters for this word are spread across the keyboard increasing the chances for typos by this untrained ‘typer’. So, let me call them ‘glassers’. To be ridiculed for wearing glasses is the worst insult for a glasser. Most annoying and most irritating. I don’t know if this is still the case in schools. There was also this misconception that the glassers would be very studious and teachers’ pets. That did not help us in joining the mischievous mainstream. Not every glasser wore glasses because they were reading every book published. I used to sit very close to the television and I managed to do this so effectively that I had to enter the glasshood as early as 10 years of age.

In college days, glasses posed me a different problem. I couldn’t wear sun glasses. Goddammit! I was always crazy about sun glasses and I thought I’d look good with sun glasses on. But I could never wear them. The sad part is even if I were to try sun glasses, I wouldn’t know how I look. I’ll hear my friends saying that it’s good and all but I could only believe them. The best I could do was to get myself photographed with sun glasses on. Then I started believing the results of some research that said sun glasses are bad for health.

The glasses have become almost a part of my body now. It’s literally true because the power of my glasses have grown with me. I started with a minus 2.5 and right now my left eye is minus 5.5 and right eye is minus 6.5. Mathematically speaking, the power has reduced but I know that it has increased. But I would never understand how the left and right eye have different powers. There is something my left eye has managed that the right eye did not learn. Poor, I thought I only had a problem of hand-eye co-ordination. If I don’t have my glasses, my life comes to a standstill. You have come close to kissing distance for me to recognise you.

For all the troubles I’ve gone through because of glasses, I must say that I grown to love wearing glasses. Sometimes it’s plain lucky that people presume glassers for learned, educated, intellectual and sophisticated men. Good for us. We can continue to wonder how to locate ‘my documents’ while people mistake us for partitioning the hard disk.