Old and Lonely: Do we care for them?
The modern society has started to understand the relevance and importance of elderly people in their lives. The younger generation has now come to realise that the elders are the keepers of youngsters and not the other way round.
GREAT many seem to be caring for their elders these days, thanks to the uncertainties the neo riche face out of their moderns ways of life. Yes, modern life offers us everything, except things attached to the elderly people. We have got every means to make all our ends meet, either by overt or covert ways. But, when it comes to equating our material manipulations with real life expectations, many of us falter and feel the pinch much before the end of the day. To be precise, we start to feel the pinch in the hands of our kids much before our elders had started the same from us.
So, it is an earlier better attitude that makes a great number of people think of educating their kids to pick up lessons that punctuate responsibilities and realities. Now many of them grow with the changing times, but with a difference that they are not ready to forfeit certain things that keep all the strings together so as to leave the fabric of real parenting in tack, with enough room for the elderly and lonely in their ‘modernities’ of lore.
What are the pointers that make a sizable section of the modern youngsters to look back and take stock?
The obsession with the welfare of the kids makes many nuclear parents feel that there cannot be a substitute for grand-parenting.
There are certain things that only come out of age and ageing.
Social recognition these days are taking a shift towards pro-parental philosophy due to the stories of untold miseries meted out to the elderly by their dear ones.
Since money is the menace, of late, there is a growing tendency among the young parents to calculate certain things not in terms of money but in terms of meaning. Many are getting met with voids created by their own designs.
The dollar dream is getting fainter and fainter and the scope for finding still greener pastures looks all the more flat and dull.
People have come to realise the philosophy that ’the end of the journey is the beginning of it’. So they feel the need for having a place to come back to, so as to call their journeys successful.
Now it sounds strangely familiar to many that the world is moving much faster than ever before. People get their dues the same way.
From a physical point of view, we are aware that elders need someone around them to take care of them. Does this not make us feel that we too need someone around us even now in this modern nuclear family order?
If one of us falls sick, who would take care of us? Super-specialty medical facilities or our modern surrogate all-in-one servants and housemaids? Or, do we have an outsourcing mechanism in place to take this job to some other shores so that we can sit back and be cool?
In a legal point of view, we have legislations and laws that safeguard the interests of the elderly population. Many younger parents know that it is better to be conscientious of their filial duties and responsibilities than be feigning ignorant or ill-informed of the prevalence of judicial senior citizen safeguards.
The whole world is becoming India-centric with regard to family, society, matrimony on the one side and philosophy, faiths and existence on the other. In such a scenario, there must be room for elders and their concerns.
The time has come full circle for the new generation to be aware that it is not in those things that come and go. Rather, they now feel that it is the very lineage that has helped and keeps on helping them to be what they actually are and that makes their life worth living.The questions cited above may look simple. Today they take greater relevance than ever before because, these questions have always been there and people of all ages have had the wisdom to find answers to them either through their words or deeds. Unfortunately, our present generation shockingly comes to realise the implications of these questions in their lives and they themselves come to understand that their sense of lineage is able to answer all these questions. It is this realisation that makes a great number of people care for their elders.
This shift is for the benefit of both the players. It is a win-win situation in all respects. The elders are the keepers of the youngsters. We, the younger generation, for sometime, thought the other way round.
Any way, no hard feelings elders! It is you who are going to take care of us and vise versa. This is going to be a refrain in our milieu in the coming days.
So, it is an earlier better attitude that makes a great number of people think of educating their kids to pick up lessons that punctuate responsibilities and realities. Now many of them grow with the changing times, but with a difference that they are not ready to forfeit certain things that keep all the strings together so as to leave the fabric of real parenting in tack, with enough room for the elderly and lonely in their ‘modernities’ of lore.
What are the pointers that make a sizable section of the modern youngsters to look back and take stock?
The obsession with the welfare of the kids makes many nuclear parents feel that there cannot be a substitute for grand-parenting.
There are certain things that only come out of age and ageing.
Social recognition these days are taking a shift towards pro-parental philosophy due to the stories of untold miseries meted out to the elderly by their dear ones.
Since money is the menace, of late, there is a growing tendency among the young parents to calculate certain things not in terms of money but in terms of meaning. Many are getting met with voids created by their own designs.
The dollar dream is getting fainter and fainter and the scope for finding still greener pastures looks all the more flat and dull.
People have come to realise the philosophy that ’the end of the journey is the beginning of it’. So they feel the need for having a place to come back to, so as to call their journeys successful.
Now it sounds strangely familiar to many that the world is moving much faster than ever before. People get their dues the same way.
From a physical point of view, we are aware that elders need someone around them to take care of them. Does this not make us feel that we too need someone around us even now in this modern nuclear family order?
If one of us falls sick, who would take care of us? Super-specialty medical facilities or our modern surrogate all-in-one servants and housemaids? Or, do we have an outsourcing mechanism in place to take this job to some other shores so that we can sit back and be cool?
In a legal point of view, we have legislations and laws that safeguard the interests of the elderly population. Many younger parents know that it is better to be conscientious of their filial duties and responsibilities than be feigning ignorant or ill-informed of the prevalence of judicial senior citizen safeguards.
The whole world is becoming India-centric with regard to family, society, matrimony on the one side and philosophy, faiths and existence on the other. In such a scenario, there must be room for elders and their concerns.
The time has come full circle for the new generation to be aware that it is not in those things that come and go. Rather, they now feel that it is the very lineage that has helped and keeps on helping them to be what they actually are and that makes their life worth living.The questions cited above may look simple. Today they take greater relevance than ever before because, these questions have always been there and people of all ages have had the wisdom to find answers to them either through their words or deeds. Unfortunately, our present generation shockingly comes to realise the implications of these questions in their lives and they themselves come to understand that their sense of lineage is able to answer all these questions. It is this realisation that makes a great number of people care for their elders.
This shift is for the benefit of both the players. It is a win-win situation in all respects. The elders are the keepers of the youngsters. We, the younger generation, for sometime, thought the other way round.
Any way, no hard feelings elders! It is you who are going to take care of us and vise versa. This is going to be a refrain in our milieu in the coming days.
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