The Cast Away

In this country we are hypocritical about many things. We pray to goddesses and ill treat our women, we donate golden palms to stones in temples and refuse to sign up for charity shows, we reap the fruits of a secular nation and praise Modi for enriching Gujarat’s wealth quotient, we crib constantly about the traffic in our cities and are the first to break the red lights and we learn, preach and feel unduly bloated with a superiority complex talking about how we respect, care for and love our senior citizens and yet ignore them completely in our society.

Last Saturday, I went to buy shoes for my mother who is 65, short sighted and has recently developed an unsteady gait due to age. I looked at five different shops, brands ranging from Bata to Liberty to Woodlands and finally Reebok and Adidas just to amuse her and found exactly four pairs of drab, black, flat heeled shoes. That’s all the choice you’ve got in this consumerist economy, a liberal-market-full-of-options-economy, if you want no stilettos, no high heels, soft, comfortable, good for your back and posture, affordable, steady, decent coloured footwear. The friendly guy at Bata suggests I get my mom to a cobbler since I won’t find what I am looking for, simple, nice looking, good quality shoes for an old slightly unsteady woman.

It struck me suddenly how our thousands-of-products-ready-at-your-doorstep retail has so little to offer the senior citizens. We still shudder at people who look for old age homes for their parents but when it comes to thinking, designing and selling products, we still cater to the young and the restless. It’s not just shoes, its clothes, bags, furniture, books, telecom, magazines, bars, restaurants, financial instruments – what have you. Even spectacle frames are fluorescent or shiny, ‘fashionable’ and glitzy, according to the smiling sales lady, “Young people are preferring this only, times have changed no?”

And why retail only, look at our auditoriums and film theatres? Except for Rangashankara in Bangalore I can’t take my old folks to any place where I am sure they wont have to rush in with the youthfully spirited lot to stumble over unlit stairs to reach their seats. Roads have no pavements where the elderly can walk quietly; jogging tracks are full of young health freaks taking their final dash to lose that extra inch; there are no special queues for them at service counters. Restaurants now come with “child-free” labels; soon they might want the elderly out of their bounds too. There are no special schemes for people my parent’s age from mobile phone companies or internet service providers, nor packages that might interest them from our Direct to Home television brands. And yet everyday I see and hear of schemes for young people, college students, mid career professionals and even children. On the roads we honk twice as much if we happen to get stuck behind a slower elderly man or woman at the wheels, our parking lots have no reservations for them either. We grudge the slightly extra time taken by an elderly person at a public restroom and often get on the hand phone to complain about these ‘oldies’ quite within their earshot. We might call them over to take care of our infants when they are born but pack them away right after their nanny jobs have been done. Even the Union Budget 2010, has washed their hands off after slightly increasing the tax exemption scale for senior citizens. The only guys, who seem to have some products available for the aged or rather the ageing, are wrinkle removing cream companies!

Basically, no matter what we say and how much we propound the philosophy of how much we Indians take care of our elderly we do nothing for them. If not for human decency, I wonder why we are blind to the market potential of the increasing well to do senior citizens. I also wonder what standards we are setting for a space where we will all get to be someday!