If you want to retire...

I'm looking forward to not having to shave or travel and, instead, potter about the house harassing the dog, growing some bhut jolokia chillies and admiring my bookshelves

In a few weeks, my term in a non-governmental organisation ends and I will be unemployed again. I will also turn 50 in December and so I think it’s a good excuse to throw in the towel. It will be the second time I will do so.

I first retired when I was 41. I had just completed five years owning and running a services business. It was a modest thing, employing about 40 people, with an office located in Bandra in Mumbai, a two-minute walk away from home. It did sufficiently well enough for me to set aside a small sum of money and call it a day.

I moved to a flat we had bought in South India (the more civilised part of our country) and spent the next five years not working. I should qualify what I mean by work: I mean going to an office space on weekdays and getting paid for it at the end of the month, which is, a job. Even when I was running my business, I had to do this routine, which I have never enjoyed. When I retired, I didn’t have to go anywhere unless I wanted to, which I mostly didn’t. I did do some work for a little money, meaning writing, though I didn’t particularly need to. And most of my time was spent at home reading and spending time with my five or seven thousand (I have lost count) volumes. It is extremely pleasurable to do this, of course, though not always easy. I am saying this because I had set myself some goals to be achieved in reading. I first felt I should read all the Greek and Roman classics. I started with the earliest book (Herodotus’s Histories) and then worked my way chronologically down the Greek ages. This was a very diverse course because the Greeks include philosophers (Plato), scientists (Aristotle), tragedians (Asechylus and Sophocles and Euripides) and comedians (the great Aristophanes) besides historians like Thucydides and Xenophon. 

After that came the Romans, and there is one point of contact when the two cultures collide, about 200 years before the birth of Christ, and the historians Polybius and Livy record it well (I am referring to the post-Alexander Macedonia’s wars with Italy and then the African Hannibal’s attack on Europe). The Romans thought of Greek as being a high-culture language, which it was and, therefore, many Roman historians actually wrote in Greek and were Greek, like Plutarch. But there was some terrific writing in Latin too (Cicero, Caesar, in particular).

 

I should explain why I was doing this reading. My education ended at age 19, after a couple of years of technical school where I was taught how to operate looms and other textile machinery. But this work did not interest me as much as journalism and the idea of working with words and information. I was very fortunate to be able to leave Surat and get a job in my mid-20s in journalism.

As a reporter — a job I greatly enjoyed because it required me to be out and about meeting people and talking to them and being in office only to file the copy at the end of the day — I was not required to know much outside the field I was reporting on (sessions court). But my interest in knowing the world through literature and history was heightened and I spent most of my spare time reading. This was reading in the way that most of us read, which is to say some fiction, some history, some bestsellers and whatever current work is being talked about.

But after retiring, the reading became focussed and specific because it was educational, didactic. One of the things I did consciously was to discard all social media. Not because it is a waste of time or useless or anything, but, in fact, the opposite. It is so addictive that one cannot pull away from it. Away from Facebook and Twitter, I could put my feet up on the sofa and read at a stretch for four hours before taking a break.

I did it for five years and would have continued doing it if I hadn’t taken up this NGO job, which was a wonderful experience, but also exhausting. I’m very much looking forward to not having to shave or travel and, instead, potter about the house harassing the dog, growing some bhut jolokia chillies and admiring my bookshelves. One needn’t even have to look at the clock and decide if it’s an appropriate time to have a drink.

I highly recommend this to anyone contemplating retirement, but also concerned about finances. The thing is that one doesn’t really need much money to give up a career. I said earlier that I set aside a small sum, but I have not touched that money because it hasn’t been needed. It’s still sitting somewhere keeping some mutual fund managers busy. I can get by with whatever I make from writing. I should add that I am married to a driven and career-minded woman, who can pay the larger bills while I take care of the house (not particularly competently). But my calculation is that even if that were not the case, it is entirely within the realm of possibility to live as one chooses to and taking ownership of every hour of the day, every day.