Shades of grey

Our respect for the aged is more the stuff of popular culture than reality

As 2014 concluded, Merriam Webster came up with the word that it thought best summed up the year that just went past. It’s “culture”, the American dictionary maker said, having arrived at the choice through a combination of online polling and readers” suggestions. Before you scoff at its overuse and familiarity, it must be pointed out that “culture” was interpreted much beyond its original semantic confines, as meaning “systematic behaviour” that allowed us “to identify and isolate an idea, issue, or group”. As examples, Merriam Webster cited phrases like a “culture of transparency” or “consumer culture”.

Looking at “systematic behaviour” is, of course, an excellent way to identify cultural traits, even when culture is defined the old-fashioned way, as the sum of beliefs, tradition and art and aesthetics of a particular group or society. For example, along with a number of societies in the eastern part of the world, India is supposed to venerate the elderly, long after they have stopped being productive assets. Ours is a “culture” that respects the aged, giving them pride of place within the family as custodians of values and wisdom, seeking their guidance and sagacity in exchange for the care they receive at the hands of younger family members.

The reality, obviously, lies far away from the notional. But before we start accessing data available in the public domain to prick holes in one of our favourite stereotypes, it might be an interesting exercise to note what kind of cultural space the elderly occupy in our everyday lives, given that all that are born will grow old someday, regardless of their class, caste or community. Newspapers, a primary source of disseminating information, can be used to gauge how the elderly actually fare in life, while commercial advertisements can be good indicators of how they are perceived to fare in life.

According to the Government of India’s National Policy on Older Persons, 1999, an “elderly” is a person who is of 60 years of age or above. There are about 100 million elderly in the country, according to a 2012 United Nations Population Fund report, a number high enough to demand some presence in the national discourse. In an act of random assessment, this writer decided to look through a month’s issues of a national daily (The Times of India, Delhi edition, December 15, 2014 to January 15, 2015) to ascertain if and how, the elderly, and the problems pertaining to their status, get written or reported about.

Significantly, the three reports that concerned the elderly over this one-month period came out in the city news pages (Delhi, in this case). The first one appeared on December 23 (Guard elderly, keep hypothermia at bay), appended to a general discussion of a severe winter, and quoted medical professionals on how best the elderly could cope with the inclement weather conditions. The second report appeared on January 1, and involved the arrest of two women travelling in a car who had stopped their vehicle to rob an elderly lady walking along the road. The third report involved a crime as well, and was reported over January 13 and 14, where an affluent elderly woman was stabbed to death by a law student who had broken into her house to rob her (62 year-old- woman stabbed 27 times).

The picture of physical vulnerability that begins to emerge—to the weather or to criminals—is but a tiny sliver of an overall dire situation that is increasingly attracting the attention of social scientists. In their study of the crimes against the elderly in India based on newspaper reports, two IIT Roorkee academics Anindya Mishra and Avanish Patel have argued that not only are such crimes on the rise, but in as many as 43 per cent of the cases analysed by them, the crime was committed either by close family members or neighbours, the very individuals supposed to provide protection and care according to everyday cultural assumptions. Mishra and Patel cite property and land dispute, caste rivalries, loneliness and lack of police attention as some of the reasons why supposedly near and dear ones end up inflicting violence on the elderly.

That the “systematic behaviour” of our society towards the aged is more hostile and violent than patient and nurturing is not apparent if one looks at say television commercials, surely an influential stream of popular culture that sets the agenda for what is important in life, what are the things we must value and what other things we might lack and want that urgently need to be redressed. Advertisements depicting women have for long been subjected to the feminist critique, for failing to accommodate the evolving role of women in society beyond that of child-bearing and engaging in domestic chores. It would be interesting to analyze how close or wide off the mark they are when it comes to depicting the aged in our society.

Older citizens routinely feature in advertisements, from health drinks to wall paint, from jewellery to cars and bank loans. While it is not the purpose of this article to analyze every single one of them, it would not be unfair to note that across the spectrum, elderly citizens on screen seem affluent and healthy, beaming with joy and pride and unmindful of any of the challenges posed to their real-life counterparts. The exceptions, of course, are the ads pitching for life insurance: their capital, after all, is impending death and decrepitude and no one would ever invest in a policy if a lifetime of bonny joviality were guaranteed to all.

Not that all the ads ignore the problems that arrive with old age. One of the “phone exchange” ads of ‘Idea’ cellular service depicted the loneliness and social isolation that old couples whose children work elsewhere often face. While the Pune-based parents, especially the mother, pined away for a phone call from the busy Mumbai-based son, the turmoil was shown to be altogether emotional, since the couple looked otherwise self-sufficient, whether at home or in their yoga class.  

Again, in an ad for the soft drink Sprite, two elderly women driving into the parking lot of a hotel are rudely overtaken by the uniformed chauffeur of a swanky car. His indifference to their hesitant timidity is symptomatic of the smug incivility that society often reserves for the old, and also leads to the Sprite-drinking young man’s prank to get the parking space freed again. But in effect, what the old ladies suffer is a spot of bother, not any danger to their selves. In fact, no amount of television watching will ever give you an idea as to how an old person, belonging to any stratum of society, is expected to defend herself if she is attacked inside or outside the house.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDFX8I8Iogw

According to a 2011 Government of India report, Situation Analysis of the Elderly in India, 65 per cent of the aged depend on others for maintenance, while among women—most of whom give up or never take up jobs in the prime of their lives—less than 20 per cent were economically self-sufficient. But in ad after ad, the old live in sprawling mansions with velvety lawns attached, attended by loving troops of children and grandchildren, bothered more by peeling wall paint or what’s for breakfast than their own safety or well-being. The quality of the care they receive is never in question, since they are never too old or never too sick, and the ideal family surrounding them is never hurt by or resentful of the demands made by the old ones.

Feminists can keep complaining about the unpaid care-giving role that befall most women at some point in their lives, but the women in the ads can be infinitely stretched and then some more. The old are cute even when toothless and regressive: a Whisper ad campaign shows a grandmother horrified when her menstruating granddaughter “touches the pickle”. It’s another matter that a grandmother of today was probably a young woman through the culturally tumultuous 1960s and 70s and unlikely to subscribe to such taboos. But then if you are old, you must be superstitious. Or so the ad people would have you believe.    

Of course, a happy and contented old life can surely be a reality for many. Not everyone past his prime need be like King Lear, “full of grief and age, wretched in both”. But the constant streaming of an idyll often prompts people to expect security and stability in relationships and living arrangements that do not offer those, with the dominant narrative failing to establish any recourse for those who might not be fortunate enough to be rich, healthy and secure in old age.