Skip to main content

Old man, wait

An old tree in my village

When I was in my late twenties I used to long for death. I didn’t want to go on beyond my thirties at least. Middle aged people were the greatest bores I had ever come across and I didn’t want to reach that stage. Moreover, I worked as a schoolteacher in Shillong in those days. The remuneration was a pittance whose lion’s share disappeared as house rent right at the beginning of the month. The end of the month would usually demand some tightening of the belt. Not a very charming existence even without the boredom added by the middle-aged moralists of various hues.
My middle age turned out to be the best period of my life, however. Life proffers interesting ironies. I landed in Delhi at the age of 41 with nothing more than some meagre savings and an attenuated willingness to experiment with life. The job I received at a residential school in Delhi had the charms of a Homeric Siren: at once enchanting and enslaving. The enslavement was as much a delight as the enchantment especially for middle-aged people. Psychologist Erik Erikson theorised that middle age is the period when people want to experience volunteering, mentoring, and making social contributions. Few other places can offer you more opportunities for those than a residential school.
Now I am a senior citizen by my country’s official reckoning. I live in a funny country which, instead of helping ‘senior citizens’ to take care of themselves, makes them pay literally breath-taking taxes for health insurances. As soon as I turned 60, the GST on my health insurance jumped to about Rs4000! My country seems to be telling me that it is time for me to leave the place altogether. My insurance agent tells me that it’s going to be much higher next year unless our very “caring” Prime Minister condescends to cut some of his Himalayan taxes which is not a likelihood at all.
The juvenile death-wish doesn’t care to haunt my soul anymore, maybe because there is too much insurance to sustain me. There are no serious worries, in fact. All those people who wanted to reform my recalcitrant soul for decades have apparently given me up as irredeemable or too old a dog to learn new tricks. The best thing I love about this senior citizenship is precisely this liberty or liberation from missionary spirits. [I hope after reading this they won’t take out their worn-out cudgels against me. Mercifully, most of them have grown old like me and must have also realised the futility of their missionary zeal.]
A contemporary of mine sent me a WhatsApp message this morning that 60-70 is the most productive age of a person, 70-80 being the second-most productive period. The claim was attributed to a study published by New England Journal of Medicine. I checked the claim online but could not determine its veracity. It is true, however, that some of the best novels were written by people in their sixties.
Psychological research says that “the potential for high-functioning brain activity peaks in our 50s but remains high until our 90s and functional into the 100s”. That is for the above-average brains, okay? “The average person peaks at 30 and declines to a non-functioning state by his or her late 80s.”
It looks like I have to wait for another 20 years to see whether my brain is above average. That’s as good a reason to go on as any other.




Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरSeptember 2, 2020 at 8:14 AM

    Nice sharing Sir. People like me can get insight into the functioning of human-life and the world around from this account of yours.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 2, 2020 at 8:26 AM

      I have a strong feeling with sufficient rational backing that old age can be an interesting phase, more interesting than the others perhaps. We just need to be a little more patient and enduring. Thanks for your appreciative words. They help too.

      Delete
  2. Rahul BhatiaSeptember 2, 2020 at 1:27 PM

    Age is just a number so carry on regardless:)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Harsh Wardhan JogSeptember 19, 2020 at 11:03 AM

    Good read!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
15 comments
Read more

The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more