BANGLADESH: May the Old Give Way to the New, says Editorial

DHAKA (The New Nation), May 20, 2007: On the subject of the Music of Age, here is the Sunday Editorial from today's edition of THE NEW NATION. "Didn't you hear what I said?" If your answer to this question is 'no', you are perhaps hard of hearing, maybe you are in your mid forties-the first phase in your life when you have started feeling the weight of your age. Then, when you are in your mid fifties, finer details of a panorama or normal fonts of a newspaper may look a little blurry even with the prescribed lens on your eyes. Suddenly you discover that your finger tips and palms no more have the sharp sensitivity to feel well the texture of a baby skin or of a cotton shirt or of the abrasive side of sandpaper. No more your tongue relishes those tastes of a fried chicken or a glass of lemonade the way you used to relish the culinary tastes in your youth. But when you can't get the smell of a rose or the fragrance of a sandalwood soap you are for sure in you mid seventies and you have but to compensate the loss of your senses by discovering other niches in life where you can silently derive other soft pleasures not so strongly linked with any of the five senses. You are already mellow! You are otherwise blessed with glories of long life. This, in other words, is what we call the music of human age, a music that starts with an ecstatic and uproarious rock song and ends with a melancholic and monotonic swansong gradually fading away. An ocean of ink has been spilled by social and physical scientists over how to freeze the aging process. Biologists have advanced a variety of theories to explain aging, but most of them agree that this process is largely determined by genes. For decades scientists are puzzling as to why a fruit fly survives only a few days and a tortoise more than 100 years! Low-calorie diets slow the aging process by lowering the rate at which tissue-damaging substances, called 'free radicals', are produced in the body. People of all ages, scientists suggest, should make a significant effort to reduce their body fat, either through caloric restriction or increased exercise. However, we should be careful not to reduce our nutrient intake at the same time. Older people, because of declining food intakes, are especially susceptible to malnutrition. Good news is that scientists have already learned how to double the lifespan of such laboratory organisms as roundworms and fruit flies through genetic manipulation. So, the day perhaps is not far away when our family geneticist will tinker with our DNA strings and chromosomes to tailor our lifespan as we fancy and will prescribe some antioxidant drugs to retard the aging process of our children. However aged we are, aging is a highly individual experience. Chronological age may differ considerably from a person's functional age, and age-related changes occur at different rates for different persons. Age-related changes don't begin at the same time nor do they all occur simultaneously. Changes as we age are normal and occur in phases in all our five senses: hearing, vision, touch, taste and smell. Social gerontologists make a distinction between the "young-old" (ages 55 to 74) and the "old-old" (ages 75 and older). Still other gerontologists add a "middle-old" category between the 'young-old' and the 'old-old' categories. But there are young people whose skins have not wrinkled at all but they are mentally older than an octogenarian whose skin is totally wizened. Those young men may be termed 'old-young'. The old-young brood and grope in the dark; they always gape at the darker sides of life; they are pathetically blind to the glimmers of silver linings that border the clouds of life. We have not forgotten the youthful zeal of our politicians who have now been mellower and who need a lot of aids in their efforts to redeliver their past valor and enthusiasm, their vivacity ostensibly on the wane. We have seen how the external carotid arteries on the necks of our political leaders inflated as they roared at the top of their voice in their speeches mesmerizing millions to be united on causes that mattered, when they were younger. We have also seen how hazel eyes of our leaders turned reddish and their arms flung forward like bullet shots as they harangued to persuade the masses to materialize political demands, when they were youthful. We have also seen leaders shuttling from one mosque to another and attending rallies after rallies with no sign of fatigue on their countenances as they delivered scholastic sermons or recited in slow drawls the poems they themselves composed the previous nights befitting the occasions, when they were already old in age but young in mind. The ferocity of Habibul Bashar's bowling on precise line and pace and his mastery of differential battings answering fast and slow spins didn't escape our notices either, when he was young. Neither have we forgotten the swimmer Brojen Das who crossed the English Channel and the swimmer Mosharaf who won gold and silver in SAF games when they were young. In sixties of the last century the pair who captivated the cine-goers of our country most was Uttam-Suchitra. Millions dreamed to replicate the charismatic personality of Uttam and Mona Lisaic smile of Suchitra when the artists and their fans were both young. Uttam and Brojen had long passed away. Suchitra, at 78, now lives a hermit's life. Bashar, in his mid thirties, is sure to retire shortly after his lackadaisical performance in the Cricket World Cup. Mosharaf has been passing his days as a couch potato watching games in television. Leaders, in their sixties and seventies, now seem more anxious on the fate of their court cases than on their political careers; they are now too perplexed to think what to do next in the evolved political developments; they only beg the Providence to grant them rendezvous with all the members of their families. Wise people go for voluntary retirement irrespective of their age once they get inkling that they no more can deliver what is expected of them. After playing in 11,117 international matches West Indies Captain Brian Lara walked into the crease for the last time on the 21 st April to play against England in their World Cup Super Eights match at the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown. He is now retiring as an illustrious cricketer, not as a diminutive performer when he will be too old to play. A heavyweight champion can't think of his retirement as an also-ran; he plans to retire with a colorful feather intact in his cap. A politician rather writes her memoir instead of vying for positions when she knows her days are over. Age 57 has been the age for full retirement for government employees in our country, though because of longer life expectation full retirement age has been increased in our neighboring countries. Age 70 is deemed as a mandatory retirement for members of some professions. But no age bar is there for politicians or for any member of any think-tank. Neither there is any mechanism in hand by which citizens may feel assured that their political and state guardians are hale, hearty and sound physically and mentally. There is no system in our country which makes it mandatory for our politicians or administrators to undergo intensive and thorough clinical checkups to ascertain whether or not they are suffering from acute physical ailments or any mental problems like dementia or early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease that may dangerously jeopardize decision making capacities of the public office holders. A person may look healthy by his appearance or by his oratory capacity, but he/she may be suffering from insidious diseases, either mental or physical. The whole nation may be entrapped in a quagmire if their leader, elected or selected, happens to be such a person who deliberately camouflaged his/her mental or physical ailment behind his smart clothes or oratory jugglery. Such a leader can in no way dispense sound decisions. If a car driver or an aircraft pilot has to undergo regular medical checkups in quick successions to retain his/her license, shouldn't the administrators of our state and corporations and justices and holders of constitutional positions assure us that they are also physically and mentally fit? Assurance, of course, should come from an Independent Medical Commission headed by a person physically and mentally 100% fit. There was a time not long ago when years of experience were necessary for societal guidance. But with introduction of fast processing machines like computers tons of information related to ages of experience is now capsulized in micro chips devaluing the necessity of older people with experiences in running the worldly affairs. Too many old people at the helm of statesmanship are nowadays viewed as Oligarchic rule, or in other term Gerontocracy. In our culture in Bangladesh the elders enjoy sacrificing for the young. As parents we deem ourselves redundant as we reach an age when we find ourselves no more productive. We compare ourselves with those old banana plants awaiting to be cut off as the plants, now bereft of fruition capacity, have already produced their bunches of bananas; now is the turn of the new shoots from the rhizomes to flare up and grow as independent banana plants. We wish to sacrifice our todays for brighter tomorrows of our progeny. But war is infamously regarded as a sacrifice of the young for the sake of the old , where old men send young men off to die, or else a sacrifice of a particular demographic ie. only low-income young people for sake of another demographic ie. a society of the rich and powerful. A stone hurled skyward moves up and up in a curvy path as it fights against the gravitational pull in its ascending flight till a point high above where it has to give in before starting its descent in another curvature to drop on the ground making a parabolic trajectory. Our life too takes a parabolic pathway in its sojourn on this planet: its youthful phase taking the ascent journey and its decaying phase the descent trip. Mark Twain said: "The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity." In fact, who is old and who is young depends on the color of the lens one looks through. Rabindranath Tagore was young at heart at his old age as he could paint colorful sketches in his young mental canvas though his exterior bore all the signatures of an old man. He compensated losses caused by his chronological age by continuously refreshing his mental age through intellectual gains in his fancy and imagination. Advance of his age rather whetted his appetite for more intellectual exercises. Plato said: "The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines." "Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul."---a golden adage Samuel Ullman recorded with a view to warming the cockles of the elderly hearts. By Maswood Alam Khan © Copyright 2003 by The New Nation