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Magazine
Enabling dignity
With regard to the article “The sunset years: Alone and vulnerable” (Magazine, April 5), the time is ripe for the Central and State governments to provide peaceful living for all senior citizens who are facing a situation similar to Lotika Sarkar’s. The governments may impose an old age relief tax to garner funds which will help to maintain old age homes so that people who spent their lives well in their prime years will have the satisfaction psychologically that the State is taking care of them and they can breathe their last without mental agony, torture and suffering. Philanthropists and voluntary organisations can also play a vital role in providing succour to the aged. The governments should embark upon providing pensions to all aged people without discrimination so that we can really declare ourselves an egalitarian society.
Nemani Vivekananda Rao
Hyderabad
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We are unfortunately treating the elderly as outdated, useless entities. Instead of learning from their experiences and expertise for our own success, we inflict atrocities on them and bruise their conscience. We force them to take refuge in old age homes to get rid of them, knowing that the same will be done to us in our needy, helpless, lone, broken times. They face violence from their dear ones for whom they sacrificed the joys of life. The elderly are the second largest marginilised, suppressed and oppressed section after women in Indian society who are in dire need of strong legislations, practical assistance, livelihood amenities and shelter. They are not demanding anything big, just love, sympathy, company. Let’s understand them, let us make their old age a golden one.
Syed Adfar Rashid Shah
Srinagar, Kashmir
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The articles make pathetic reading. It is indeed a tragedy that old age has little dignity, no value of its own and no bright virtue to compensate for its humiliations and handicap. Naturally, this unavoidable phenomenon has become a dread to millions, the world over. Even those who are physically and mentally fit and economically comfortable, find themselves psychologically crippled. The efforts to ward off aging are born of this dilemma, but such unnatural attempts to suppress the hard facts simply do not work. Perhaps the only remedy lies in the words of E.M. Forster: “The identification of old age with growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age. I had it myself between the ages of 25 and 30.” “There is nothing more beautiful in the world”, observed Lin Yutang, “than a healthy wise old man or woman”. Nonetheless, the fact remains in the words of Oscar Wilde: “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old , but that one is young”.
K Gopakumar Menon
Thrissur
Denied rights
This is with reference to Arundhati Dhuru and Sandeep Pandey’s article, “The wages of protest” (Magazine, April 5). The Right to Information Act, brought into force in 2005, has already become farcical. Almost every application for information under Section 6 of the RTI Act is being rejected under Section 8 of the Act on the ground of exemption from disclosure of information. If the Act is enforced strictly, the legislature may even repeal it, true to the observations of Abraham Lincoln, who said that the best way to have a statute repealed is to implement it strictly. It’s time to create special courts under the RTI Act for speedy disposal of applications seeking information rather than to make the Information Commission constituted under the Act entertain them.
K. Pradeep
Chennai
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