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.