Why celebrate the youth when we treat the old as dead

Anyone who has attempted to plan a holiday for aging parents or anyone with a disability will immediately realise how woefully inadequate our existing infrastructure is. But perhaps the lack of infrastructure and support is merely symptomatic of something far more worrying: our imagination that if you are disabled or ageing then you are confined to being at home and not entitled to the right to enjoy life with freedom and dignity. A few years ago, I suffered from Chikungunya (literally bent over or an old person's illness) at the same time that my mother had a knee replacement surgery. For two months, we both walked very slowly with the help of a walker, and while it was excruciatingly painful at the time, in retrospect, I consider myself fortunate for having had an illness which altered my experience of speed, mobility and comfort.

While the able-bodied may count themselves as lucky and occasionally even feel empathy or anger at the state of affairs, the thing about ageing is that it is a lot more equalising and we are all headed there sooner or later. In that sense, even the most able-bodied amongst us is only temporarily so, which leads one to imagine that if not out of empathy, then at least out of long term self interest, we should all collectively think about the support systems we put into place for the aged. For a country that prides itself as a youthful nation with a large part of the population under the age of 25, it is very easy to slip into an intoxicating presentism, but what is 40 or 50 years in the life of a country, or indeed a civilisation?

A sharp contrast to India is Japan, which, for a few decades now, has been dealing with the crisis of being an ageing society. But we should remind ourselves that the Chinese word for crisis is the same as opportunity and ask what it may mean to look at society not from the perspective of the young alone. This is not merely a question of allocation of resources alone, but a question of changing our perspective and situating an ethics of care within the core of our political imagination. This change of perspective does not merely affect how we think of urban and rural infrastructure but brings in a different ethos to how we think of larger questions of political economy.

It is interesting that the Japanese are gearing up for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. The last time the city geared up for an Olympics was in 1964 when a resurgent post-war nation showcased their youthful modernity. Is it asking for too much to imagine an Olympics that does not merely celebrate those who are higher, faster and stronger? Living as we do in an era, which has seen the rapid destruction of the environment by those in the development race, it may not be a bad idea to begin thinking of those who are slower, lower and weaker. It would be our hubris to imagine that it is only the young who have something to contribute, and if we ever slip into short term memory loss (and it will happen) we may want to remind ourselves that the man who more or less walked India into freedom was 78 years old when we had our tryst with destiny.