I believe in the adage, when in Rome look like the Romans, and to try fit in the society we are living in as expatriates.

But whichever country my wife and I are residing in, I always feel like a misfit and see myself as either short, skinny, or scrawny with a paunch.

The reason I am being so insecure is because of a depressing article I read recently on how people are still racist, sexist or ageist in 2018, when such attitudes should have been dumped into the dustbin of time, so to speak.

The article pointed out how tall or handsome guys or beautiful or pretty women are the first to be offered jobs or given that raise that you had been praying and wanting and salivating for all these years.

I was always under the illusion that I was tall, though not exactly towering, and only recently when a doctor wanted to check my Body Mass Index, BMI (a complicated calculation that involves squaring your height and adding the rolls on your tummy), that I realised my height is below average and that was maybe the reason I was always stuck in lousy jobs that nobody wanted.

“Your height is 5 feet 4 inches,” said the nurse, after I had requested her to measure my height. The clinic had a weighing machine that also had a sliding ruler attached in the back that I had to slide down to the top of my skull. “And your blood pressure is normal”, she said, though I could feel a vein in my neck pulsating wildly.

“That’s strange,” I told my wife. Aren’t you 5 feet 7 inches and I was taller than you when we married?”

“Men shrink as they age,” said my wife. “I read somewhere that your spinal cord loses bone mass and you turn into a midget.”

“Very funny,” I said, and when we went into the doctor’s clinic, she said the BP was high and I need to control it and that my height was 5 feet 9 inches. “The nurse outside is spreading fake news,” I told the doctor, who did not think it was funny as she was getting wrong readings of patients the whole day.

When I first joined an English-language newspaper in Saudi Arabia, all the Saudis looked tall and elegant in their white, flowing robes. (This was the time when Western fast food, or junk food as it is now popularly known as, was just being introduced into the Desert Kingdom and from then on people slowly started growing sideways and became short and pudgy).

When I went visiting my friends in Jeddah over the weekend I found one hanging from a bar he had fixed between the door post. “You gain half-inch every year if you do this daily,” he said. Years later when I met him at an airport, his height had not changed but his arms seemed longer than normal as he pushed the luggage trolley.

When we moved to Canada, most everyone in North America, was much bigger than us. But despite eating cheeseburgers for brunch and poutine (French fries topped with cheese curds and brown gravy) as a teatime snack, I never became menacingly hulky like the TV show gangster, Tony Soprano.

In Dubai, I finally realised that you do not have to be a certain height to be rewarded hugely in your career. Aamir Khan, the phenomenal successful and popular Indian movie star visited the Gulf News office one day and I got a glimpse of him through the crowd of fawning and deliriously delighted women in the office.

I noticed that he walked with a gait that showed he was supremely confident about himself and he seemed just about my height or even shorter.

Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. Twitter: @mahmood_saberi.