In one of the blogs, I was reading about this remarkable American gentleman, who at the age of eighty-three is so energetic and leading a very active life. He says he is engaged in some kind of net marketing business with a partner who lives hundreds of miles away. The two partners had not met before and the younger partner who is only twenty seven or so never even imagined that he was having a business partner so old until the older person told his age for some reason. The old man Harry was carrying on with his duties efficiently that the young partner had no reason to suspect that his partner is an old man. Sorry I should never call him an old man. It is one’s outlook and lifestyle that differentiates the old from the young. It is the mental attitude that matters.
It is indeed nice if one can earn even at an advanced age. It is very common for writers or painters to go on achieving more and more with advancing age. But in most other professions after one reaches 60 or 65 one has to slow down or stop working altogether. For many office workers 60 is the limit unless one is a top notch Director or a highly skilled professional. Very few though learn new skills at an advanced age and start new ventures. Mr. Harry seems to be one of the few exceptions.
There is another angle to this. Many people start to feel bored with routine work, which they are good at but want to call it a day. They are happy to retire from work even at 50 and take to a leisurely life but one has to stick it out as long as one can due to financial compulsions. It may not be very easy to get used to idling at home when all your faculties are still in good condition. Some get bored and take up new assignments, some others cultivate new hobbies and some others become club bores, talking always of their exploits during working years, not caring to bother if others are really interested to hear their stories!!
In the olden days very few people reached the ripe old age of 60. It was a landmark in one’s life and used to be celebrated traditionally. People of 60 used to be considered as old and treated with some respect. When I was a young boy I thought that my maternal grand father who was just over 60 years was very old. This is in the early forties. He was retired at 55. He was a man of ample substance and lived a lavish life as I remember. He had a Ford V8 car and a chauffeur and stopped driving at the age of 60 due to old age! He was westernised in many ways. He used fork and knife, had oatmeal porridge for breakfast with eggs, bacon & ham. Lunch used to be traditional South Indian fare with rice and a number of vegetable curries, mutton and fish. Teatime with English biscuits, in those days. Dinner was again a mixed fare, English and Indian. He used to drink Whisky in moderate quantities and used to take a laxative called Kruschen Salt (Spelling?). Generally he wore ordinary cotton shirts buttoned up to the neck and a clean white Kerala type dhoti called “mundu”, all starched and ironed. On his outings he would wear a double-breasted cotton coat and a belt over the Mundu. An “Angavastram” starched and properly folded would be worn on the shoulder. Footwear he had several pairs in different colours and designs, which he would wear with woollen or cotton stockings. He would also carry an ornamented walking stick when walking to the club, which was about a hundred and fifty yards from home. There he would play Bridge with similarly retired friends and return home before seven to have his whisky before dinner. There were several servants, cooks and maids and gardeners and a lot of people hanging around. One of his close valets, who was his confidant and managed his estates, was a muscular seedy type, a known rowdy in his hay days. My uncles and later my father disliked him and when my mother inherited the house and a handsome share of his properties (being a matriarchal society), my father dismissed him. One evening while he was playing cards in the club, with friends, my grandfather suddenly died. A very sudden painless (!) death, which his friends noticed only when he was not responding to the bids. He was a prominent figure in Trivandrum and hordes of friends and relatives visited the house to pay their last respects. Everyone thought that he has had a full life (63 years) and that he was lucky to have gone before being bedridden for years.
Those were times when life expectancy was 30 years?! Now, thanks to the progress in medical sciences, life expectancy in India has almost doubled after about 60 years. I do not think that anyone thinks seriously about death before the age of 70. We have a lot of people living after 80 or eighty-five years. This has also brought about a lot of changes in the society and relationships. People of 60 and 70 years think of themselves as young. Many look forward to many more years of happy and healthy life. The needs of old men and women have increased, with the changes of their life style. They are game for all the pleasures of the young people. They feel neglected and lonely if they are not in the company of the young, not even bothering to find out if the youngsters want their company. The present day youngsters earn a lot of money compared to the meagre incomes of the past. When the older people see that their children make so much more money they also want to partake in all the enjoyments. This attitude is basically different from the traditions.
By the Hindu culture, as one grows older he/she should shed desires. When desires are reduced, wants are also reduced. Happiness, which comes from the pursuit of desires, is momentary and there is no satisfying it. True happiness comes only from a state of life without desires. It is possible only if a person learns to view life without attachment to worldly material objects. This detachment has to be cultivated, as one grows older. For example it is very cute to watch a child playing with toys but as the child grows up he should discard the toys to which he is so much attached. Then he would get attached to other forms of enjoyments like games, reading etc. When he is a young man he would get attached to girls and so on. At each stage one has to detach oneself from something, which was till then closer to his heart, to evolve and get attached to something higher in life. When one grows old he has to detach himself from most of the material enjoyments. Happiness is a state of contentment, which comes only from shedding attachments and desires. Is it not better not to have desires for worldly pleasures than in actually enjoying these pleasures? May be it is debatable, but considering the momentary nature of the enjoyments, the Hindus (also Sikhs, Buddhists etc.) believe that the path to happiness is through detachment from material pleasures.