When it comes to careers, is age just a number?
What does a person, say an investment banker, do when his career is over, he is just about forty, and his life extends in front of him like an ocean vista? Buy an ocean front property, play the share market and stare at the vista. If you’re a wrestler, you join the police or the railways.
Virat Kohli has spoken about a sportsman’s career being very short. It’s one of the reasons that keeps him motivated — the dangling sword. It’s a problem that afflicts musicians and sportsmen more than others. Even actors find roles when they are older, though not as many as when they were younger.
Musicians, especially contemporary DJs, are launching into careers earlier than ever. As the Netflix documentary After the Raves shows, fifteen-year-old kids from Dutch small towns now command huge audiences and make millions. Being underage, these DJs are technically not allowed to enter their workspace — the nightclub, unless they are escorted in and out by their parents.
The rest of humanity finds its feet career-wise from its thirties onwards, the age when sportsmen are usually considered too old to play, though there is the odd exception. The case of three Aussie cricketers comes to mind. Bob Holland, who passed away last year, made his state debut when he was 32 and his country debut at 38. Mike Hussey made his international debut at 30, while Adam Voges retired at 37, having scored most of his runs in a twenty-test burst, late in his career.
Novelists and poets, on the other hand, can start early and go on till the very end. Poet Dom Moraes won the Hawthornden Prize at the age of twenty. Jean Rhys started writing in her twenties and published three slim novels. Then, silence. It would be 27 long years before she would publish Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. She died 13 years later. Wide Sargasso Sea still sells thousands of copies and is widely prescribed in American schools.
Similarly Henry Roth took an extended leave of absence after the success of Call It Sleep, first published in 1934. It would be 60 long years before he published Mercy of a Rude Stream, in four volumes. Nirvana was playing on the radio.
Musicians fare slightly better than sportsmen when it comes to their limited careers. George Michael sang wistfully about the fickle audience on his album Patience. Some, like Pulp’s Russell Senior, retired at forty, at the peak of the British band’s success. Senior said he felt silly standing on the stage and singing to teenaged fans. These days, he happily runs an antiques store in Sheffield.
Previously, rappers had the shortest shelf-life but it’s changing with the current generation. Jay-Z is 48, Eminem is 45, Kanye is 40 and Pusha T is 41. Rappers lasting this long is a new welcome phenomenon in pop culture. The last three all dropped new albums this year. Pusha T’s 21-minute Daytona was hailed as instant classic. Eminem acknowledges that rap is a young person’s game but, at the same time, he has argued in interviews that he is going to use his skills and platform to say things as long as he has things to say.
While sports folk fare the worst, we don’t feel too bad for them because they have already earned a ‘pension’ that would see several generations through. Maradona pulled mountains of quality white powder in the immediate aftermath of retirement. Indian cricketers rarely go down this road because the arranged marriage system makes sure that they are ‘well settled’ with kids, way before retirement beckons.
Maradona cleaned up his act and returned as the excitable football coach, pacing the stadium’s sidelines. Coaching, commentating and playing golf are a former sportsman’s handful of options. Most say ‘I look forward to spending time with the family’ but how much time can one spend with one’s family?
But then, there is also the other side of the spectrum. Let us not forget that we live in an age when human life spans are increasing. This year saw two remarkable stories about nonagenarians.
Just last week, a 95-year-old former Nazi prison guard was arrested from Jackson Heights in New York, carried out on a stretcher and deported to Germany to face trial. Jakiw Palij must’ve thought it was all over and done with when the past caught up with him when he least expected it to. The long arm of the law dragged him back out of pleasant retirement. Palij’s career was nasty, brutish and short, and yet its consequences lingered on into the 21st century.
In Malaysia, in May this year, the sprightly Mahathir Mohamad was voted back to prime minister-ship at the age of 92 (he had retired in 2003). Clearly, age is just a number for some, and retirement a choice, not something foisted on you. According to the South China Morning Post, Mahathir, who has undergone two coronary bypasses, ‘keeps fit by following a simple daily regimen: no smoking, no drinking and no overeating. A bit of exercise and reading also helps, apparently.’
(Courtesy of Mail Today)