Old Bones Nation

Three separate incidents brought the subject of age and our attitude to it centre-stage this week.

There was that wonderful bit of sniping between Rahul Gandhi and Kerala CM VS Achuthanandan, when the 40-year-old Gandhi made a snide reference to the 87-year-old CM’s age and said if the LDF was elected, Kerala would have a 93-year-old chief minister in five years.

Not one to be a slouch in this ageist slanging match, the veteran CPI(M) leader dissed Gandhi right back by calling him “an Amul baby” who had “come to Kerala to campaign for Amul babies”.

In a separate incident, Tata Sons last week brought down the age for retirement of its non-executive directors from 75 years to 70 years, shortening the careers of some very prominent Tata Group leading lights like Tata Motors’s Ravi Kant, TCS’s S Ramadorai and Tata Sons’s R Gopalakrishnan, amongst others in a bid to “make space for comparatively younger corporate bureaucrats in the group’s boardrooms” according to the group’s press release.

And, of course, age was mentioned in almost every news report of the Anna Hazare phenomena, as anchor after breathless anchor made it a point to remark on how “a 73-year-old leader had inspired Indian youth across the country!”

So what are we: ageist or age-blind? As one of the youngest nations in the world, do we give youth its due, or are we still secretly in awe of old age? Do we worship at the altar of youth, or are we, in fact, suspicious of its seeming immaturity, under whelmed by its apparent naiveté and unwilling to make room for its ascent as we guard our territories?

Consider the following, the triumvirate of Khans that holds Bollywood in its thrall are all in their late 40s — middle-aged or even senior citizens by most standards.

Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood’s emperor, is 69 and Rajnikanth, considered the epitome of virility and action, is 61.

The nation’s most revered sports star, Sachin Tendulkar, is 38. Its business leaders, Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, N R Narayana Murthy are all above fifty, and don’t even get me started on politics: with a cabinet whose average age is approximately 66.90 and a prime minister who is 79, a finance minister who is 76, and the dynamic youthful faces of the government like P Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal and Jairam Ramesh in their late 50s and mid-60s — grey seems to be the colour we love most.

Then, of course, there’s anecdotal evidence: the prejudicial adjective “brash” is often tagged on to “young” as if the two are synonymous. Detractors of the Rajiv Gandhi brigade of technocrats and executives called it “the babalog government”, and who can forget R K Laxman’s sniffy dismissal of the late PM’s imminent rise when he drew him as a cherubic baby being walked in a perambulator by his mother Indira?

No sir, I believe we are a young nation that gives its young people short shrift and is unduly suspicious of them.

Of course, youth might have its last laugh. Change could come in its political landscape, for starters, if a petition were filed in the Supreme Court to benchmark an age limit for politicians, and there is nothing to stop the Election Commission from initiating reform in the age limit for its elected leaders.

But that would need a massive overhaul in the thinking of a nation in which to say that some one is ‘just a bacha’ is considered insult enough!

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer