The title of our blog, as you can guess, a take off on a famous title by W.B.Yeats, addresses a major issue in our country, especially because today ends the senior citizens week.
Why say so, is that your question? Well, ageism is horribly rampant in our country. We are so sold out on the so-called demographic dividend that we are eternally mocking the senior citizens, actually a huge and exponentially increasing group, just for their being senior citizens!
Age is actually nothing but a mere number. The senior citizens today are much better than the youth today who mostly have only one quality, the so-called youth. In the age of Info Tecnology, they are only good at using technology as an addiction, be it the now-out-on-its-way t.v. or the currently ubiquitous mobile.
They would never use the t.v., if at all, to watch better channels, and they use the mobile for the silly social media or for binge watching. Just because they can use in a little more adroit way the programmes, already coded and uploaded and channelised by someone else, they continue to think they are smart!
Actually, they mostly create nothing. They pride on, for example, how they can use the ChatGPT to download answers to questions they could never even imagine! Their hold over every natural language, including the mother tongue, is extremely poor. They think they are smart because they communicate using the abbreviations as slang and the emojis!
Why talk of them? Well, in comparison (an activity they are very good at in a jealous, mean way) with the better among them, any, even a mediocre, senior citizen would be the best, as a human being, as a citizen, as a communicator, as a creator, and, oh, yes, as a user of technology which even a child can master with a little bit of practice.
Those who are now senior citizens, newly minted or already well in to senior citizenship, have cared for and developed in a huge way all that makes anybody a human being, be it relationships, be it knowledge creation, be it social awareness, be it conscious conscientiousness. Their humour continues to be sardonic, never wicked nor mean. They have always been truly progressive in every field.
Unlike the so-called youth today who are masters of none and jacks of all that is ordinary! The only thing they are okay at is the ageism bias! Cry, hence, the beloved country coz is it at all country for the aged? That is the question!
Pratima@ Yeats' solution was the soul singing the songs of contentment which yet again the aged are much, much better at, mostly because they do not know just the sole, whether be of a shoe or of a rampant sole/(self-centered-)ness!
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