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His louche smile got to me the other day at a dinner party. Let’s call this gentleman of a certain age Mr X. There he stood, lanky and leaning over the sofa, with a stupid grin slashed across the bottom half of his mouth — the kind that invites the retort: wipe that grin off your face.

“You know, life is beautiful, thanks to Viagra. No full stops now… I can carry on until that bloody reaper comes to fetch me,” he says, as he cups his drink (more water, less, much less, whisky) with one hand, and puts the other around the waist of a desperately-seeking-youth woman, and dissolves into the crowd.

All this in answer to the usual polite party conversation question. Anyway, just before he’s out of hearing range he turns round to deliver a parting shot: “Just have to worry about my blood pressure and heart though.” I don’t begrudge Mr X his renewed vigour.

This is after all his blue period: the colour has lost some of its melancholy meaning for many after those little blue pills arrived.

Don’t get me wrong: Midnight’s children, and even the oldies, have as much right to be frisky and to frolic in the contemporary updates of haystacks as do GenNow.

After all, many gliding into the autumn of their lives have also begun to sniff the promise of spring around the corner of a dreaded decade.

It’s been a while since the seven year itch shrank — to four years, four months, who knows? The standard issue itch celebrated in films and literature has got company: we now have the geriatric itch.

There was report in the papers this week about an 80-year-old man who asked his bluestocking globe-trotting wife (they had been married 40 years) for a divorce when she returned from a seminar.

The gentleman had, it seems, fallen in love and he wanted his new love to move into his home. Just look at some of our desi snowy-haired or erudite NRI literary celebrities going coochy-coo with their much younger partners.

This column, however, is not about love in the time of old age. Puck seems to be sprinkling the love potion indiscriminately in India, on the old, the young and even the married. That is, if one goes by the latest Durex Sexual Wellbeing Global Survey.

Not only do Indians appear to be satisfied with their sexual lives (nearly three-quarters of those interviewed said they were), but they no longer shy away from gabbing about it. Even stating what they want in bed.

Their satisfaction levels have zoomed far above the legendary Latin lovers and the Brits. The Greeks and the Mexicans, however, have attained even more Olympian heights.

But is it all for real? Whenever I have doubts on subjects like this I ask my good friend Sandhya Mulchandani. She has authored several books about Indian sexuality: Erotic Literature of Ancient India, Love and Lust and Kama Sutra for Women.

“Rubbish”, she replied when I asked her about the survey. “There is not more sex going on. Perhaps it is being tabulated more.” That was her first reaction. But after a few minutes she conceded that there was more dreaming about sex, not to speak of talk about it going on.

India@60 is a nation in its adolescence and so therefore are Indians according to her. “We are all going over the top…all this excess and daring to dream.

Some of it might be coming true. If an 80-year-old dares to dream… if a 60 year old is attractive, with the availability of willing women and the anxiety of performance resolved, who knows…”

As for women, they might well be wondering which god to pray to, she says. “It used to be Lakshmi for prosperity. So who do you need to pray to for great sex?” No answers that one. Perhaps all that ‘daring to dream’ has more to do with idle boasts.

My hunch and Sandhya’s as well is that it has more to do with window-shopping. The freedom to look at something attractive passing by. The sages of this land have always told us that it’s all in the mind anyway.

Email: madhu_jain@hotmail.com