Call me paranoid but I sense a conspiracy. In the U.S., little league baseball is always importaning ringers from Latin America who are really too old to be eligible to play baseball, but are able to lie about their age due to the region’s poor birth records. Is the greybearded Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh likewise too old to be eligible for office, or maybe too young? From TeamIndia.net:
Asked by accompanying journalists aboard [a] flight that took him from London to New York Monday evening about [a] planned birthday celebration on air, Singh was quietly dismissive.
“I have never celebrated birthdays. I don’t even know the exact date I was born.”
He explained that a few weeks after he was born in 1932 in Gah, a village in Punjab province of what is now Pakistan, he lost his mother. And he, therefore, never got to know his birthday till the time he was enrolled in primary school when an approximate date was given as his date of birth for the school records.
As A N N A would say, “Gah!”
this isn’t so rare actually. my father was also born in what is now pakistan, where it wasn’t always customary to make strict note of birth dates. my grandmother passed away while he was young, and our grandfather was apparently not bothered enough to remember the birthdays of nine different children. my dad’s only been able to back out a rough date from various family accounts…