The difficult part of being on the other side of "Six Feet"

Year 1997.

As a school going young kid, I was very happy. Along with toughly fought academics, I was now on records a topper in one more aspect in my class. At five and a half inches over five feet, I was the tallest!

Fast Forward to year 2012. Surely and certainly at the end of my vertical growth, I am a tad under Six feet four inches. Am I still as happy? Ummmm… Well…..

Being tall is undoubtedly cool. It gives you that towering personality which in first look can give a great inferiority complex to a lot of people. But without going into all that, let me try to draw your attention towards the other side of being tall.

The most basic disadvantage is that almost all the products that are mass produced come in standard sizes. The taller you are, the farther away you are from the standard. Be it the clothes you wear, the footwear you use, the mattresses/cots and bed sheets you use your choice gets limited. You might really like a particular design or a colour combination, but it might not be available in the size that you are looking at. Many a times, you will be forced to go for customized orders, which take their own sweet time not to mention the additional burden it’ll put on your wallets.

Next comes the comfort while you are travelling. Be it air, rail or bus travel, you are never at ease! The leg rooms available in the buses and aircrafts are so meager that you will simply be waiting for the journey to get over and run out of the place. You’ll start cursing your height when people start brushing against your feet every second minute when you are attempting to catch on long lost sleep on a long distance train journey. Travelling is one of the biggest nightmares I personally have. That’s not all. You sit on a two wheeler, and appear as if you are riding a bicycle. Your knees at times get locked with the handle bars when you try taking a deep turn. Four wheelers are no different. A height as big as that, drastically reduces the alternatives you have!

Then, as a tall person, you are easy to be spotted from a distance even in a thick crowd. It’s difficult to hide from others (read people you want to avoid). You need to take extra care about yourself when you go to new places. When I go to my hometown, where most of the houses are still of the ancestral days, I need to be very careful when moving between rooms as the doors are very short. Additionally the ceilings too are pretty low, which necessitates me to have a watch on my hand movements!

You are tall, will require you to bend a lot. If you weigh disproportionately, the whole weight falls on your ankle and that goes for a toss. Wrong postures can lead to major problems on the spinal cord! Though everyone can be prey to problems stated here, the tall ones are slightly more vulnerable!

So yeah, being tall is not easy! It comes with its own, unique, unavoidable problems. And the bigger challenge is you can’t do anything about it and you just have to live with it! :)