The loneliness of the elderly in India

A greying India needs old age homes, elder-friendly devices, affordable healthcare and daycare centres. But more than anything else, it needs us all to bridge the loneliness gap

- SANDIP ROY

Baghban has just turned 20. That film has been our glycerine standard when it came to depicting ageing in popular culture. In that five-handkerchief weepie, Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini are the senior citizens, growing old and lonely in the new India, not allowed to live together, passed back and forth by their ungrateful children.

It paints the breakdown of the extended family as the arch villain. The joke goes it's the family film that you cannot watch with the family for fear of being guilt-tripped by the parents.

Actor Samir Soni, who played the eldest son, told the entertainment portal Bollywood Hungama he has heard that too. After the film released, a woman came up to him in a mall and said: "You are a very bad son! You should be ashamed of yourself."

Much to my chagrin, it's also one of my mother's favourite films. Though Soni said he heard there was a spike in parents taking out insurance for themselves after the film released, I sometimes feel Baghban turned the conversation around ageing into a full-fledged nostalgia trip for the long-lost extended family.

Years ago, I visited an old age home in Kolkata. Every other person there had some heart-rending story to tell. Someone's son assaulted her after she refused to sign over the deeds of the house to him. Yet another lost her son and felt like a burden on her daughter.

"What to do? The times are bad," one lady told me. And all the other old ladies nodded in agreement. They had all seen Baghban.

But Sarah Lamb, professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, US, and author of several books about ageing in India, once told me there never really was a golden age for elders in India. "There were always old people being kicked out by their children," Lamb said. "It's just that now you blame modernity and globalisation."