The Last Chance

I was eating dinner, my phone leaning against a glass of water, when a man on YouTube told me my chance to climb Everest was over.

He was a finance guy. He had made enough money early and stopped working long before most of us even dare to think about it. He said wealth, for him, was simple. It was freedom with his time and his energy. He said there is no point running after money all your life, because the older you get, the less money can do for you. Then he said it. After thirty-five, forget Everest. That chance is gone. Live now, while there is time, or life will leave you behind.

I have never wanted to climb Everest. Ever.

But it hurt. I kept thinking about it for days.

I think I know why. When I say no to something, that is my choice. When someone tells me the chance is already gone, and nobody asked me, it feels like a door shut behind my back. And I started wondering how many other doors had shut on me while I was busy living.

So one night I took an old notebook and started writing. What can I never do now, because I am forty-five?

Some were easy to write. If I wanted to join the army through the National Defence Academy, I had to apply before nineteen and a half. Gone. If I wanted to become an IAS officer, my last chance was at thirty-two. Gone too. I smiled at both. I never dreamt of a uniform, and my wife would laugh at the idea of me running a district.

Then I wrote one that made me stop. I was a cadet once. A thin boy on a ship, very little money in his pocket and the whole world in front of him. By thirty I had seen thirty-five countries. That boy is gone. No shipping company will take me as a cadet now. I miss him more than I expected.

I wrote that I can never learn a new language like a native. In 2018, scientists at MIT tested nearly seven lakh people and found that our ability to pick up grammar like a native starts dropping at around seventeen and a half. I can still learn French. I will just always sound like a Coimbatore boy speaking French.

I wrote small things too. I can no longer be the young boy at a family function that everyone fusses over. Now the relatives ask me about my sugar levels. A child can cry in a shop and everyone forgives him. If I cry in a shop at forty-five, people will quietly look away.

By the end of the night I had two full pages. I sat there looking at them. It felt like reading a list of everything I had lost without even noticing.

Then I went back to the first line. Everest. And I looked it up.

In May 2013, a Japanese man named Yuichiro Miura reached the top of Everest. He was eighty years old.

Eighty.

He had already climbed it at seventy, and again at seventy-five. Four years before, he broke his pelvis and his thigh bone while skiing. Four months before the climb, he had heart surgery, his fourth heart operation in six years. And still he went up. When he reached the top, he called home and said, "I never imagined I could make it to the top of Mount Everest at age 80." He also said he was totally exhausted.

I read that line again and again. I felt a little foolish. I had believed a stranger on YouTube without checking, and I had carried that sadness around for three days.

So I went back to my list and started crossing things out.

The body does get weaker with age. That part is true. But in 1990, a doctor named Maria Fiatarone got frail nursing-home residents, average age ninety, to lift weights. In eight weeks, their leg strength went up by one hundred and seventy-four per cent. Ninety years old. I play badminton, and my knees complain after every match. The evening I read that, I went to the gym. I had no excuse left.

Then I thought of Fauja Singh, a farmer from Punjab. He lost his wife and one of his sons, and in that grief, he started running. He was eighty-nine. He ran full marathons until he was a hundred. In July 2025, a vehicle hit him while he was crossing the road in his own village. He was a hundred and fourteen, and he was still walking on his own two feet.

Half my list was wrong. Those doors were heavy, but they were open. The finance man mixed up hard with impossible, and I believed him.

But some of the list stayed. The government ones, yes. At least they tell you the date clearly. And then there were the ones that never tell you anything.

Tim Urban, a writer, once counted the days he had spent with his parents. By the time he finished school, he had already used up ninety-three per cent of all the time he would ever spend with them in person.

I read that and thought of my two sons.

When they were small, they used to run to the door when I came home. One day they stopped. I have no idea which day it was. Nobody told me it was the last time.

And my mother. My parents lived in Coimbatore. Every Sunday I could call and hear her ask, "Did you eat?" Now there is no one to pick up. No rule closed that door. No one warned me. It just closed, on an ordinary day.

So the finance man was right, only about the wrong thing. Wealth really is time. Some chances really do end. Everest will still be there when I am eighty. My mother's voice will never come back.

Those are the real last chances. They never come with a date.

So this is what I want you to do this week. Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side, write the doors that are truly closing, the ones with a person behind them. On the other side, write everything you gave up because someone told you that you were too old. Pick one thing from the second side and start it this week. And pick one name from the first side, and call them today.

You already know whose name it is.

As for me, I still have no wish to climb Everest. But now it is my choice. Nobody took it from me.

And that, I think, is what being rich really means.