Subir Roy: A generation got left out

Make enough at the peak of your career, so that there need be no systematic effort to earn thereafter

When my father retired at the age of 58 four decades ago, he did so fully, in mind and body, and stepped onto a new life thereafter. The sedentary life of a judge, coming abruptly after a youth spent in good part on the cricket field and tennis court, had taken its toll. Diabetes and high blood pressure had arrived too.

Post-retirement, he spent a happy decade and more discharging his new dual responsibilities — that of a key figure in the management of his guruji’s ashram and within the family that of a punctilious grandfather. He was able to do all this without undue financial worries because of his government pension that survived even after his departure as family pension for my mother. Significantly, she had more pocket money in her last days than ever before in her long life of struggling to run a family on a subordinate judge’s pay, courtesy the revision in pension rates after every pay commission’s award.

When my father needed higher medical consultation, he walked over to the state-run SSKM Hospital near our South Kolkata home and sat across the table of some senior specialist (once a judge sahib always a judge sahib) in his chamber and had his consultation done free. When my mother had to be operated upon a couple of times, a competent specialist in the same hospital performed the task and my mother stayed at the Woodburn ward which was for the so-called VIPs.

She complained about the bathroom which had a broken bathtub which no one would remove but was well treated by the nurses. Her own sweet nature saw to that. We never thought of taking either of them to a speciality, posh private hospital because they were not the rage then as they are now and also because we knew they were beyond our means.

I was born at home with my grandmother in attendance but our son was born at a distinctive private hospital, Woodlands, the bill paid by the provident fund money that I withdrew when I changed jobs. I wouldn’t have been able to do that at today’s charges. For most of their school life, our children went to school by car and their performance in school was enormously helped by costly private tuition.

But the biggest generational change became clear once they completed college. They did not have a fraction of the concern about finding a decent job that my generation was burdened with at a similar stage in our lives. My children’s prime concern was finding out what they really wanted to do for which experimentation and directional change were par for the course. Our daughter is in her second job and still not so sure what she wishes to do with her life. Our son, after changing disciplines, knows what he wants to do but is far from being able to consider his career successfully launched.

How neatly our generation fell in between these two! I began life as a journalist but had to yield to intense family pressure when I landed a prized nationalised bank job. On joining I found that over half my batch was made up of people, some of them till lately college lecturers, who were there simply because there were so few other decent jobs. In my father’s time, the middle class sailed into decent jobs much more easily and its perception of what was decent was also far more modest.

But change caught up with my generation soon. The media exploded after the Emergency and thereafter arrived the new genre of business journalism as the corporate sector came riding the coat-tails of the slow liberalisation that began in the 80s. Those who took the plunge like me, changing security for doing a fun thing, had few regrets. Media salaries were ahead of the curve, compared to public sector pay.

But there is one aspect that I forgot to take care of, or to be honest, wilfully ignored — the small matter of a pension which had kept my parents going. Now that I have retired, reality has caught up with me in an even bigger way. My father at that juncture in his life was physically and mentally ready to take a window-side seat in the bus. I am not. I don’t feel like a grandfather, either in mind or body, and I am far from turning religious.

These days when I advise youngsters, I carefully spell out the one-third rule. Spend a third of your life skilling yourself, the next third earning all that you will need for the rest of your life and then the last third in doing what you like to do without, and this is vital, having to bother about where the upkeep will come from. In sum, make enough at the peak of your career, which should not stretch into your 50s, so that there need be no systematic effort to earn thereafter. Then you can do what you have always longed to do but couldn’t afford to, like writing a novel or taking up mountaineering or simply seeing the world at leisure.

So, my generation got left out in the middle. It is ready to start living life anew at 60 but Indian earnings in the 80s and 90s weren’t good enough to allow the crucial financial cushion to be created to enable that. We should be worried but life’s too good to be ruined by the frown on the face of your accountant. The romantic notion of a journalist who always lives for the day dies hard.

subirkroy@gmail.com