A matter of age
Iusually avoid them. Films starring Amitabh Bachchan. But a pandemic, which has left us confined and confused, can make one do the avoidable. So, I watched it. Gulabo Sitabo, which was the first big Bollywood film to be released on an OT T platform (Amazon Prime Video) and stars the man whose most memorable roles, for me, were in which he played second-fiddle to seasoned actors (Dharmendra in Chupke Chupke and Rajesh Khanna in Anand). Or when he played a calculative, opportunistic jiggery trader in the 1973 Saudagar, a most unBachchan-like film.
In every other movie, no matter what his getup be, the character he is enacting remains subservient to Amitabh Bachchan, the star. Gulabo Sitabo was no different. But what stood out was Farrukh Jaffer, the 88-year-old who plays Bachchan’s wife, Fatima Begum. She is introduced as an ailing woman who Bachchan is waiting for to die so that he can own her once-grand and now-crumbling haveli.
An ailing, old woman. Nothing exceptional about that character. Until there’s a transformation. She recovers, gets the glint back in her eye, drapes herself in a glitzy sharara, and eventually abandons her greedy husband to elope with her boyfriend from the days of her youth (Now we’re talking). Reading her farewell letter, squatting on the floor, her tenant played by Ayushmann Khurrana exclaims, “Is umar mein bhi koi bhaagta hai kya (who elopes at this age)?” That was ageism in your face, and I was so happy to see the walker-assisted Begum defy it.
Age. There’s a lot that is associated with it, culturally and socially. So much of ourselves we let go of as we age. Even simple, ordinary pleasures, such as getting on a swing or a slide, become no-go areas. One such video of a gentleman of advanced years slipping into a swing in a park and making the most of it made me smile this week. It was an out-of-the-ordinary moment, one that got me thinking why it had to be so. Why do videos of elderly people breaking into a dance make us smile and think of them as “cute”? Blame it on the stereotypes about ageing. Ordinarily, we would stop doing these things as we age, no matter how we enjoy them, or enjoyed them.
I love climbing, for instance. Not mountains or boulders. But shelves, cabinets, and trees. It makes me extremely happy. But out in a public park, I find myself hesitating. The last time I scrambled up a tree in Lodi Gardens in Delhi, I found a 14or 15-year-old sitting on one of its branches. “Aunty, I’m taking a picture for Facebook,” he exclaimed in dismay. I sheepishly scurried down, feeling like an idiot for not acting my age. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have. I had as much right to be on that tree as that teen. The only upper hand he had was that he was on it first.
We live in a world where ageism, in-your-face or casual, is an inescapable reality. And we know that.
Geriatric love, such as Begum’s, would kick up a storm in real life. Even in Indian cinema, few films have compellingly explored the subject. Khatta Meetha (Pearl Padamsee-ashok Kumar) and Life in a… Metro (Nafisa Ali-dharmendra) are an exception. Ordinarily, such a relationship would be caricaturised and employed for comic relief.
Some years ago, I was “invited” to visit an elderly-living residential society. It was on the outskirts of the city, a beautiful oasis in the heart of nothingness. It had wellplanned apartments with anti-skid flooring, rods and railings for support everywhere, light switches that glowed in the dark, a doctor on call, a club, a community centre… But it was the most depressing place I have visited. That people aged 60plus who had the means and wanted a safe and comfortable life had to transport themselves out of the city, that our city planning could not provide such a space to them was a shame and another example of discriminatory ageism.
Also problematic is the language used to address age. My father called the other day, absolutely appalled at a reporter describing a 60-year-old as a buzurg (old man). “How is he a buzurg at 60 when at close to 80 I’m not!” he fumed.
We could do with a campaign against ageism. The World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledges that ageism “is pervasive and has profound negative consequences on older adults’ health and wellbeing”. Since 2016, the WHO has, in fact, developed a “Global Campaign to Combat Ageism” wherein it is gathering evidence on how it is experienced, its consequences and is working on strategies to tackle it. A non-ageist world is the goal.
One good area to target and demolish could be the mammoth anti-ageing industry. Like the fairness creams’ business, this too creates, feeds into and flourishes from the idea of ageism. Besides, a study shows that the only age at which the human body stops ageing is 105.