Love and respect are not commodities that one can demand from others as a matter of right. Sometimes you earn it through hard selfless work. For some, by way of their personality and behavior, they simply get it. But if you go to bargain for it or argue about it what you get in the end would be the spurious stuff. There was a time when youngsters respected their elders – anyway, that is what the older generation keep reminding the youngsters all the time – but in those days too there were kings who imprisoned their fathers and elders, gouged their eyes, chained and beaten them etc for the sake of gaining the kingdom! But now ill-treatment of elders must have become rampant that the Government has to step in and bring in laws to protect the rights of the elders. Now with the new laws in place, smart aleck youngsters can no longer throw out their parents to fend for themselves in their old age. The intentions are good but how far the laws would benefit the senior citizen is to be seen yet. There are laws to protect women from harassment by the husband and his relatives for dowry etc, but they have made little difference to women. On the other hand there are many cases where the husband and his parents are harassed by scheming women out to take revenge on the Male species.
One should not take the senior citizen’s protection law (if that is the name given to it) too seriously and go on demanding more and more from the younger generation. Leave the young ones alone because they have to cope with a lot more stresses of the present day life style, than you ever had. What the older generation has to learn is to discard desires and expectations. Well then that is another discussion which will go on endlessly!!
Alamelu Ammal aged 82, traveled alone from the US and arrived at the new Bengaluru airport around 9 AM in the morning. Though her son living in Chicago had given detailed instructions to her on how to go about the new airport, the long flight played hide and seek with her memory and she was nonplussed and disoriented. She decided to wait for her son to come and pick her up from the air port and she sat on a comfortable chair and went to sleep! Deep sleep!
She woke up around 2 PM and went into a flutter. She thought that she was in Singapore air port and panicked. Some one helped her to call her son in US and talk to him. He told her to take a pre-paid taxi to go to the city. The taxi left her at her apartment but she could not open the front door and therefore sat on the stair case for a breather. Again she dozed off until someone tapped on her shoulder and woke her up. She started asking for her son who, she thought accompanied her from US. She told the stranger that she took a taxi from Singapore airport and paid $600/- taxi fare. The stranger somehow opened the door for her and she went inside dragging the baggage. She could not stay inside for long because the apartment was locked for over six months and she could not stand the stink of dead rats in the house.
The problem with Alamelu Ammal was that in her old age she had become crabbed. She was a widow for more than 18 years and living a frugal life on her husband's pension, when suddenly fortune smiled on her. She sold her small plot of land with the shabby old house for about thirty million Rupees and that turned her life upside down. The sudden wealth made her insecure and crabbed. She thought that all her children and other relatives were after her money and became very quarrelsome with them. She went to US to live with her son but could not stand her daughter-in-law. So she fought with her and took a flight back to Bangalore within six months. In her old age she wanted all that she was not able to afford when she was young. She bought a diamond necklace for about one and a half million. She went on a spree of buying Kancheepuram silk sarees and expensive dresses which no one would wear at her age. She would eat all kinds of food from restaurants and become sick and so on. All in the hope of finding happiness! Because of her insecurity and suspicion of others she did not have any friends and even her close relatives shunned her!!
This is the case with many senior citizens today. Parvathy’s wicked aunt (about whom I have written in my earlier posting “Bitching, bitching all the way.”) is nearly 80 years old and she is on a binge. She is wicked and jealous of any one and every one including Parvathy. In her old age she has made her sons buy a luxurious house for her in Kerala which she has furnished and refurnished at least four times in the past eight years, each time after seeing some one else’s house better furnished! She wears padded bras and goes to the beauticians for facials. Till the age of almost seventy years she never went to a beautician or wore luxurious dresses including padded bras!! Though by nature she was wicked even during her youth, she has become more so in her old age. She caused rift between Parvathy and her brother by joining hands with Parvathy’s sister-in-law, who is even more evil than the aunt and was a sworn enemy of Parvathy from very beginning! Parvathy’s mother has also come under the influence of the wicked aunty who has fed her all kinds of wrong ideas about how to deal with sons and daughter and caused differences between Parvathy and her mother (86 years old) and spread all kinds of canard against Parvathy! It is beyond the imagination of all those who knew Parvathy that the very relatives for whom she has slogged for many years would turn to be serpents – her mother, her younger brother and his wife, and the wicked aunty!
This is what happens when old people become power crazy and ambitious and wicked!! We hear so much about the large youth population in the country but very soon the oldies will out number the youth!! Already several brands of incontinence diapers and old age accessories are filling the shelves of super markets!!
