Quest for stress-free sunset years

Today is World Senior Citizen’s Day. Try telling that to any middle-class elderly person in your locality and you will get a drained reply stating the problems being faced by them — ranging from financial to psychological. Battling falling interest rates and struggling to keep up pace with rapid technological changes, senior citizens in our country are a harried lot.

With rising treatment costs and medicine prices along with family responsibilities, even those senior citizens who had amassed a sizeable retirement corpus are feeling the heat. Earlier, retired life meant going on pilgrimages and places where they were earlier not able to visit because of other commitments. But the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the problems of senior citizens.

In India, the emergence of the nuclear family system has led to many problems for senior citizens. With offspring living in a different city or country in majority of households, senior citizens have to deal with loneliness and face mobility issues. There are regular reports in newspapers that show senior citizens being discovered dead inside their abodes and none coming forward to perform the last rites. As a civilised society, this is something which we should be ashamed of.

In this age of commercialisation, a day like World Senior Citizen’s Day may elicit many thoughtful posts on social media and some brand engagements. But it should not stop at that. The government should take steps to ensure that senior citizens in our country are able to live a stress-free life. It is ironic that in a country where the majority of the politicians are senior citizens, the senior citizens remain the most neglected lot.

Having spent the majority of the years toiling hard and making sacrifices, senior citizens in our country deserve much better. Policymakers should focus more on geriatric welfare and make provisions for their financial well-being. Parents, elders and teachers should make children more empathetic to the needs of old age. Old age homes were never an integral part of the East. We should try to integrate the elders with our families as much as possible.