Devangshu Datta: The regime of ancients

VIEWPOINT

The response was: "BOO-HOO, I think I will commit suicide tonight! So (sob & hiccup), I won't be there. Have a nice day (SOB-SOB)!" Hang-up. After an internal debate, I decided not to call back. (The lady is still alive, still working in PR and I sincerely hope she's having nice days.)

PR is a high-stress profession and it got to her, temporarily at least. Stress does get to people. Heart attacks, blood pressure, bulimia and OCD all have strong correlations with stress. Jawans frag officers. People commit suicide. Or they scoot between alcohol and drugs, and/or scream at the kids and indulge in spousal abuse.

The medical formulae for coping with stress are simple. Exercise regularly. Get lots of sleep. Eat healthy, regular meals. Drink moderately. Don't smoke. Keep pets. Take holidays. Spend quality time with family and friends. Cultivate hobbies. Indulge in hot sex. Essentially, chill out.

In practice, most of us manage only partial implementation of the chill-out list. And at best, these actions help you to cope. They don't actually reduce stress, which is embedded in most modern professions.

Stress-levels rise with seniority and responsibility while the physical ability to cope with stress drops with age. A 55-year-old CEO has to handle more stress and has less downtime than 22-year-old trainees. He or she is likely to be less fit and therefore, much more likely to play the lead role in a workplace heart-attack.

Life insurance premiums implicitly recognise this. So does the concept of age-limits. Age-limits are low for defence personnel and airline pilots for example. Even army commanders-in-chief undergo stringent medical tests. The reasons are obvious. People can die in large numbers if these professions screw up.

Elsewhere, age-limits and health barriers are less explicit but still market-imposed and clear. The limit is absurdly low for sportspersons and it's cruelly evident when a sports icon has entered the pensioners' bracket. Among other entertainers, screen-heroes become grand-dads and heroines become mums. Dancers open academies and transmute into choreographers.

Ironically, the one profession where there is no age-limit is the most stress-laden of all. Politics is overrun with geriatrics because ill-health and senility are no bars to political success. There is no mandatory health or sanity test for either politicians or their electorates. In their time, voters across the world have picked multitudes of drunks, egomaniacs and sex-maniacs, apart from outright lunatics. Alzheimer victim Ronald Reagan, who had trouble recognising himself in the mirror by that stage, won a record second-term victory despite that mild handicap.

While carrying no age-bars or health disqualifications, politics is a 24x7 profession, associated with physical risk and very irregular hours. Practitioners often need to make tough decisions. Political mistakes cause misery. Quite often, they result in, or contribute to, the deaths of large numbers of people.

How often do sick politicians made bad decisions as a direct result of being incapacitated? David Owen, who held several ministerial posts in various British governments, has written a fascinating book " In Sickness and in Power: Illness in Heads of Government during the Last 100 Years" on this subject.

Owen's qualified to comment because he's a practicing neurologist apart from being a successful politician. He's linked the known medical records of politicians with their handling of historic crises. He contends for example, that JFK did better in the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) than during the Bay of Pigs Fiasco (1961) simply because he was in better health in 1962.

It's an angle Indian historians may profitably consider. India's history is replete with Himalayan blunders that are difficult to attribute to rational causes. The mistakes have usually been made by politicians in dodgy health because Indian politicians tend to the old and infirm. Is it possible that the correlation points to causation?