The National Portrait Gallery recently opened The Indian Portrait 1560-1860, an exhibition showcasing a small, but significant collection of Indian portraits during a period of expansive change in India. Looking at this exhibit, you can clearly tell that the earliest influences on Indian art are symptomatic of ancient styles, think of Egyptian wall paintings for example. That is to say the subjects are all seen side on, in two dimensions – and the detail, care and embellishment is in miniature; quite often through floral –festooning, gilding and bright hues. The collection is almost like a series of illustrations – as opposed to grand artworks made for large spaces. When we think of Indian art in general, this type of miniature style is what comes to mind. Think of all the Bayeux-tapestry-style renditions of the Mahabharat, Ramayan and quite interestingly – the Karma Sutra.

In the grand timeline of art history, styles and methods have varied considerably. Often these have reflected a changing shift in society – but so far, we’ve come to understand these periods as reflecting the culture of the west (renaissance, baroque, rococo etc). In the east, art has moved at a very different pace – it has still reflected the world in which it’s from but tells a completely different story. The exhibit tells us about the significance of patronage, colonial rule, and the deliberate difference of the ‘real and the ideal’ for example.

With portraiture, something which was usually used to suggest stature, station and narrative, there was an evident global shift into a more natural – life-like study of character, dimension and mood. All of this happened at a very different time to the development of portraiture in the west (where experimentation with depth of field kicked off around the post-medieval period and spread east). In fact, the exhibition mentions that Iranian and European art in general had a strong influence on the earlier, earthier Indian style of painting. Indeed as you move along, it is interesting to observe this gradual evolution.

Two of the paintings I compared and noticed were Tilly Kettle’s painting of Nawab Shah and his sons – bright – like a comic book, but flat; and Kala killing the tiger (1815, The David Collection) – detailed, shaded and realistic. The latter was probably my favourite as the viewer could not only appreciate the detail in the decoration of the work, but also the effort created in representing accuracy and realism. It suggested that realism that was permeating the culture of those in power. If art could hold influence over others – then surely, the more domineering, attractive and impressive it is, the more successful it becomes. Perhaps this vision encouraged the bleeding of realism from west to east, fuelled by the wealth of those with colonial power and patronage to recruit the artists of the Mughal, Rajput and northern dynasties.

Overall, I felt like there was a lot to be learnt from the exhibit, but I wouldn’t necessarily achieve all of this from simply looking at the paintings themselves. They’re too small and require further contextualisation for a better understanding. Understandably, it is difficult to achieve this in small space. I would like to view them online for example, where I can zoom in and out – and learn more about how each portrait was designed to be viewed: in a book, on a wall, in a library? I especially felt this when moving through the brightly lit walls of the National Portrait Gallery and glancing at giant images of Fiona Shaw and Germaine Greer (which you know are supposed to be there). Which leaves you wondering – where were the Indian portraits originally kept and how did the Indian public originally view them?

By Varkala standards, the air was a little bracing one January morning last year when our elderly neighbour informed my girlfriend and me that the local Hindu temple would hold its festival at the end of the month; it would run for four days.  Now, this temple isn’t large or overly celebrated; just another neighbourhood temple, really.  That, combined with the fact that I was still relatively new in India and had no idea what the phrase ‘temple festival’ actually meant, led me to a somewhat understated reaction.  A festival, I thought.  How quaint.

Over the next couple of weeks leading up to the festival, excitement and expectations grew.  On the final night, there would be a Kathakali performance that lasted all night, and six or seven elephants would join a parade at dusk down our street.  It sounded like good fun, but I’d heard of festivals nearby that had fifty or even a hundred elephants.  How incredible could six or seven be?  You’ll enjoy, said our neighbour.  Sure, I said, trying to believe him.

The festival began at 3 a.m. on a work night, with music.  It was much more than just ‘music’, though.  Massive speakers had been placed strategically around the neighbourhood to ensure that any respite was absolutely impossible, and cranked up to 11.  At dawn, it was replaced over the PA by bone-rattling drumming.  ‘Okay, okay!’  I wanted to shout.  ‘I believe in the festival!  I am now excited – and festive!  Can you just let me sleep for a few hours each night?’

No chance.  When there wasn’t music or drumming, young folks let off fireworks and firecrackers in the schoolyard next to our house.  Sometimes there was music, drumming and fireworks all at once.  It all added up to an experience I figured I’d never forget, but for all the wrong reasons.  All night we lay awake, eyes pinned open by the noise, and all day we fended off sleep and deprivation-induced hallucinations at work.  There is a natural order to things, and it seemed to have been completely subverted.

Come the final day of the festival, I was more than ready for it to be over.  Still, I tried to keep high spirits, it being my first.  Within seconds of the parade’s start, however, it took no effort to smile.  Or to laugh with delight, or to gape in amazement.  First came a band of drummers, about 20 rum-stoked youths in dhotis beating out an intoxicating rhythm; then dancers carrying huge fountains of red, orange, pink, green, gold that stretched three metres up from their shoulders; then Kathakali actors swathed in ornate costumes and vivid makeup; then children, some as young as five, carrying ceremonial oil lamps.

Finally, the elephants arrived, weary with their heavy attire but still a fitting and impressive end to the parade.  Our landlord and his family, who came for the day, fed each elephant bananas and puffed rice in a dutiful and dignified manner.  We later learned this was a yearly tradition for all the houses on the street.  I looked on in wonder: this ‘experience I figured I’d never forget’ could now be added to my collection of cherished memories.  The colours were extraordinary, and the indescribable energy in the street was something I’d never felt before.  I couldn’t wait to tell my friends and family back home all about it.

The elephants and drummers and dancers sashayed on down the street.  My conversion complete, I turned to my landlord and exclaimed with glee, “That was INCREDIBLE!  Did you enjoy it too?”

His expression barely altered, save for a flicker of respectful amusement at my glee. “Yeah… well. Another festival, I guess.”

Amid all that euphoria over a 7.5% growth rate, rising economic prosperity and the attractiveness it presents as an investment destination, it is easy for outsiders to overlook India’s struggle with an escalating Maoist insurgency. What Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of the country called “the single biggest internal-security challenge” that India faces. Last week the Home Secretary G.K Pillai reiterated the magnitude of this threat saying the Maoists want to completely overthrow the Indian state by 2050. What a paradox though that this violent struggle stems out of an anger of being excluded from the very same growth story that so often dominates global headlines. So powerful and violent has their movement become that after years of being put on the backburner it has now become impossible for the Indian government or the media to ignore this conflict as it gets bloodier by the day; spreading to 20 of India’s 28 states.

These days, the Maoists, or Maovadis as they are called are in the news everyday. One day it is for beheading a policeman in Bihar, the next for killing 24 cops in West Bengal. The rural revolt that sparked off with the Naxal movement in 1967 is slowly taking on epidemic proportions and of the 6,000 people that have died in the last 20 years, this year alone, close to 700 have been mercilessly killed. The government is finding it increasingly difficult to control this insurrection because unlike terrorist groups, the Maoists are scattered among India’s poor, its massive tribal population from West Bengal to Andhra Pradesh & Bihar to Maharashtra.

So even as the Home Minister P. Chidambaram earns laurels for a much better internal security situation post the 26/11 terror attacks, he has been strongly criticized for the failure in stopping this particular contagion of left wing extremism from spreading. To begin with, the police are badly equipped, ill-trained and constantly battling inadequate manpower, and lack of equipment. But more importantly it is the absence of a cohesive policy response from the centre that is worrying experts. On one hand state governments like the one in Jharkhand are accused of supporting Maoists for electoral gains, while on the other alliance partners in the government itself, like the TMC have been blamed for being soft on them. Just recently an arrested Maoist leader claimed that the TMC had provided them with arms!

But the root of the problem is a socio-economic one. The intelligentsia in India, very often accused of justifying the acts perpetrated by the Maoists, constantly stress on the fact that the solution to ending this crisis has to come not from stepping up an armed struggle but from tackling the root cause; the gross inequalities and decades of dispossession these people have been subjected to. Writing in the Guardian, prominent author and activist Arundhati Roy says “right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerrilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have – their land.”

The land she talks about is rich in minerals and being rapidly usurped by several multinational corporations and mining companies like Vedanta through MoUs signed with the government that run into trillions of rupees. Roy believe the stakes are too high for the government to tolerate any dissent from tribals who are being stolen off their only source of livelihood to feed India’s capitalist dream.

The other side of the argument is that it would be stupid to believe that development and land protection are the goals of Maoists; it is all about power. The usual tactics used by them include blowing up any mark of development, whether it is trains, rail tracks or local offices and therefore believing that they are well intentioned folk fighting the grievances of their people would be naïve. Any efforts by the state at developing Mao inflicted regions have been constantly quashed and hence a reconciliation with them would hardly be the answer. Instead there are suggestions that the Maoists should be separated from the tribals and then dealt with, with an iron fist which would include a military option.

But there is a broader consensus emerging on opening up talks with the Maoists, where both the sides (the government and the Maoists) abjure violence and come on to the negotiating table. In fact the Maoist leader Kishanji made such an offer on the condition that the government suspends its anti Naxal activities for 72 days, only to attack the CPRF forces in West Bengal 3 hours later. That shouldn’t however be a reason to give up. After all, there have been successful examples of terror groups such as Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland giving up arms and joining mainstream politics, playing by the rules of a democratic set up. More recently, there have been talks of bringing the so called ‘moderate’ elements of the Taliban at the centerfold of Afghan politics too.

Whatever the strategy, it is going to be a tough road ahead for what seems like a very complex problem with no immediate solution in sight. But one thing is clear – the poorest of regions are those with the highest degree of Maoist infiltration which evidently means they are filling a vacuum for the lack of governance by the incumbents. Without a doubt then the only option before the government is to drastically improve the living conditions of these people and give them a sense of hope in order to prevent them from choosing the other option – taking arms.

The 100th International Women’s Day anniversary brings some very happy, but a whole load of rather grim news for women in India. First the good – after years of being stuck on hold, the women’s reservation bill which would reserve 33% seats for women in parliament looks like it will finally be passed today, giving the much needed boost for those wanting to join mainstream politics We are anyway among the few nations in the world who’ve had a woman Prime Minister in the past and currently have a woman as President along with a woman speaker, a woman leader of the opposition and a woman at the helm of India’s ruling coalition. This would only be the icing on the cake!

Add to this, six of India’s top banks have women CEOs, along with two Deputy Governors at the Reserve Bank of India. The 3rd most powerful woman in the world – Indra Nooyi too is an Indian and guess what, ALL of Forbes’ top philanthropists from India this year are women, not a single man there. Whew! On the whole it seems Indian women are shattering that glass ceiling and marching along with men in every sphere of life. Yes, there are large disparities in pay scales and not as many as desired are at the top level in corporate India. But year after year there is a marked improvement in the ratio of women to men in managerial or leadership positions and that is encouraging.

Sadly though that’s pretty much where the good news ends. For every one of these women making headways in corporate boardrooms and parliamentary committees, there are hundreds and thousands of others retreating many steps backwards. I vividly remember a shocking incident 3 years ago when I went to Gujarat, apparently India’s fastest developing state, to visit my brother in Baroda. His landlord’s wife who had been 3 months pregnant came back from the hospital one fine day and told us she had aborted the pregnancy the third time over because the unborn baby was a girl. Horror-struck as we were, her story it seems isn’t all that shocking or rare for most of India despite the fact that prenatal selection has long been banned by the government.

So as economies the world over fight fiscal deficits, India it seems will be soon fighting a chronic girl deficit. Reports from the studies carried out by the Britain based medical journal Lancet suggests 120 boys are being born for every 100 girls in parts of Northern India and 1 out of every 25 female fetuses are being aborted, that is a staggering half million girls being murdered every year! In parts of India such as the North East, Delhi, Gujarat and Haryana the sex ratio is so skewed that there are less than 900 (in some cases less than 850) girls born for every 1000 boys. What’s worse, and in fact more worrying is that this imbalance is rapidly increasing, augmented by the proliferation of Ultra Sound machines, and not decreasing as would be expected, with affluence or education! In fact in the posh parts of South Delhi where rents are comparable to any European city, the girl to boy ratio is a shameful 845 to a 1000.

I don’t know what to say really except that, perhaps it is time we stop patting ourselves on the backs for the great headways we are making on the world stage. It would probably be more fitting to hang our heads in shame and not say a word more until we get this sorted. For a double digit growth rate would mean absolutely nothing when we are faced with the prospect of large scale social anarchy where squads of single and frustrated young men would unleash their might on the few remaining women available in our great country.

Not yet perhaps time to say ‘Happy Women’s day’ after all!

I used to eat at Indian restaurants–a lot. Not the posh, pearl-inlaid, teeny-weeny dishes kind, but the little hole in the wall spots, the kind with ever-changing menus and cheap plastic cutlery. Samosas were better eaten hot off a napkin, tandoori tastier when I could actually see the tandoor. But the posh places still beckoned, their fancy water goblets gleaming in the sun when I passed by, their leather-backed booths piled with silken cushions, exuding luxury and comfort, the perfect spot to linger after a rich and satisfying meal.

One Saturday, during a long, hunger-inducing walk, Joe and I landed in front of one of the posh places. “I’m starving,” I said. “Want to try here?”

He shrugged. “Passes the test, I guess.” Joe’s measure of a restaurant is simple–if Indians are eating there, it must be good. Like everyone else, we ordered the buffet; the waiter brought us a basket of bread and pappadums. The cushions were soft against my back as we ate, the low murmur of chatter familiar, warm, sort of like an impromptu family reunion. Breaking off a piece a paratha, I swept dal into rice, my finger deft with practice. But as I lifted the paratha to my lips, my skin pricked–the woman at the next table, dark-skinned, dressed like a the heroine’s mother in a Bollywood movie, stared first at my hand, then at my fork. I popped the paratha into my mouth. After a moment, the woman looked away.

At first, I chalked Bollywood Mum’s stare up to absent-mindedness–I’ve inadvertently stared at people in restaurants and coffee shops, on the train, in the rain, while out buying mops (Baby likes reading Dr. Seuss – a lot). But as I continued to eat my paratha, people continued to look, turning their heads and taking short, covert glances as if watching an exotic bird. Was it Joe? In a room full of Indians, my pale, freckled husband stands out. But no–the glances skipped over his head, settling on my hand. A quick check of the room confirmed it: table after table used knives and forks, even with naan, paratha, and roti. I was the only person using my fingers. The only person breaking my bread. Setting the paratha aside, I picked up my fork.

Until that moment, I’d assumed all Indians ate with their hands. The folk at my hole in the wall restaurants used naan to sccop up their lunch. My family scoops rice and gravy bare-fingered or with bread. Even Joe uses his fingers when eating Indian (though only with bread), as Baby probably will. Eating Indian food with fingers felt like a natural consequence of growing up Indian, much like eating Chinese food with chopsticks is a natural consequence of growing up Chinese. Was eating with fingers and bread now uncouth?

Three years later, I can’t quite get my head around that day. An Indian friend says she’s refuses to use her fingers unless there’s bread, saying it’s unpractical and too messy, especially if you’re having a conversation with friends. One of my aunts suggested that the restaurant-goers were all Western-born and educated, and ate with knives and forks to fit in. Joe pointed out that they could all be higher caste Hindus, with rules my Muslim family is unaware of. Whatever the cause, I felt, for the first time, more Indian than Indians, yet somehow more lost than ever before, as if there were a secret Indian newsletter and I’d been left off the mailing list.

Today, I rarely eat out. Since Mir arrived in July last year, I’ve been on the go, grabbing snacks (protein bars, cheerios, anything than can be eaten one-handed) eating whatever Joe can whip up while I nurse Mir to sleep. And those times when I crave a good Indian meal? I order in, get out the paper towels, and scoop to my heart’s content.

If you’ve watched Food Inc recently, the next time you dig into that hamburger, you’ll probably be wondering where the cow came from, and that’s its biggest triumph. Directed by Robert Kenner, this Academy award nominated documentary makes you THINK about your food, so often veiled behind the façade of glossy packaging and branding propaganda. The fat cow blissfully roaming around lush green meadows on your label is probably an image of the past. Today’s animal is a manufactured industrial product. It is among the millions bred, force fed and slaughtered in crammed cattle camps, barely able to stand because of injuries and lack of space by the time it’s about to go under the grind, just so that you and I can eat cheap stake.

But more than being a PETA video, Food Inc is a wake up call for consumers like us, relentless campaigners of cheap supermarket meals, so estranged and cut off from the realities of what we consume, where it comes from and at what cost. I had my reservations to begin with, about this being yet another left wing conspiracy theory against the institutions of capitalism, but the makers have deftly steered clear of any such temptation.

Food Inc is an important film because it dares to confront issues the mainstream media has blissfully ignored. How many of us know that a monopoly of just a handful of (Four to be precise) food corporations is running the entire show in the US food supply chain? Or of their murky nexus with regulators (the USDA and FDA) and the misery of small American farmers beholden to the demands of these profit hungry monoliths? If you’ve wondered why we are getting fatter, perhaps it is because our food policy encourages people to eat all the junk money can buy. If processed meat or burgers and chips come at a fraction of the cost of fresh vegetables, it is hardly rocket science that cash strapped families are going to rely on takeaways and ready to eat frozen meals.

There are several issues the film tackles, from the aggressive lobbying that goes on to get almost dictatorial bills passed, suppressing any room for consumer dissent, to how profits are being put ahead of food safety (remember all that euphoria about E.Coli?) and the predominant use of corn syrup in a majority (80%) of the ingredients at the supermarkets, which has in effect resulted into the re-engineering of our food habits. At the outset this might seem like an American film. But it isn’t! The industrialization of food is soon becoming a reality in developed countries like India and China too, as supermarket chains and big corporations make headway into the organized food retail sector.

Watching this film made me rethink whether I really want my naturally organic environment to be altered to suit western concepts of eating. It is really necessary to have a choice of 47,000 items when you do your food shopping? Some might call it archaic, but in India we still go to the street side market (the bazaar), not the supermarket to buy fresh produce every day. Our fruit and vegetable consumption depends on seasons, unlike in the American supermarket where “there are no seasons” as the film observes. Takeaways and frozen food are an exception, not the rule.

But with affluence and an unthinking adoption of western lifestyles things are changing, and at a rapid pace. India has for instance sounded alarm bells at the rise of obesity which experts predict could reach chronic proportions in the next 25 years, especially among the middle classes. Go to any mall and you’ll have proof of this. Every second person is fighting the bulge, even as on the other extreme we have more malnourished people than in any other country in the world.

At the end of it, what this film does and very effectively at that, is lay bare hard facts in front of us. The solutions to bring about a change are not easy, and perhaps it is too late for western consumers to change and adapt to a more austere pattern of food consumption. But for developing nations like India, where policy on organized food retail is still being framed and the influence of large corporations on what we eat is still minute as compared to traditional farming, recklessly abandoning our natural way of life would after all be foolish.

Travelling around India, you soon get a feel for the different states, the overlapping cultures and the variances in regional languages – all of which give each pocket of the country its own identity; it’s own character, it’s own soul. The landscape is no exception. Rajasthan is dry, dusty, and hot. The sun beats down unrelentingly and sucks the moisture out of the red earth. Travelling east through Delhi and the northern plains, the ground flattens out and vast, unbroken agricultural land stretches as far as the eye can see. The northeast, as the elevation rises, is hammered by the annual monsoons; a quick look at a climate chart will tell you that Darjeeling can receive as much rainfall in the month of July as New Delhi receives in a whole year – it is this epic battering that makes the region synonymous with tea plantations.

Along the southwest coast, as the coastline stretches down from Mumbai, in Maharashtra, through Goa, Karnataka and on to Kerala, it follows a common pattern; mile after mile of sandy, palm fringed beaches, lapped by the warm Arabian Sea. Some of this pristine coastline has long been established on the tourist trail: the beaches of Goa are renowned the world over, judging by the holidaymakers that flock there every winter, and Kollam, in Kerala, some 600 kilometres south, has been overwhelmed with development to cater for the seasonal influx. The real gems of the coastline, in my opinion, are the lesser visited spots in between. Gokarna, in Karnataka, is one of them; a small string of beaches that grow quieter as the distance from the bustling little town increases, where you fight for the prime sunbathing spots with the local cows (a fight you can never win). Further south you pass through the Backwaters, a network of lagoons and waterways with tiny settlements on the waterfront; a trip along the backwaters gives the sensation of travelling back in time as much as you’re aware of the physical journey forward, and on a small, rickety public ferry, the feeling is exacerbated.

My favourite place on the Keralan coast was Varkala; an auspicious town dotted with ancient temples, and a small, perfectly formed crescent shaped beach at the bottom of a sheer cliff face. Along the clifftop there is a cluster of restaurants and small shops, bars, and ayurvedic treatment centres, but the cliff itself has restricted the growth of imposing hotels and so the town retains it’s welcoming, neighbourly feel. I stayed in one of the guesthouses set back a little from the waterfront, where at night, there is nothing to hear but the silence itself, broken by the odd falling coconut. A few of my fellow guests there asked our host, Jayan, about the rumours that every year a handful of people that are hit by falling coconuts, sometimes with serious consequences. I myself had a couple of very near misses, with a coconut, or sometimes an entire leaf falling to the ground beside my feet.

‘It happens,’ he confirmed ‘every tourists asks about this…but Indians, we really don’t think about this at all’ he added. ‘And anyway, this is karma’ he said with a grin. A moment later he slapped a mosquito on his arm, killing it instantly. ‘Hey’ I asked ‘isn’t this also bad karma, killing mosquitoes?’ If it was, I was in for some harsh reparation somewhere down the line. ‘It is their bad karma’ he told me, absolving himself, and me, from future repercussions.

I could have happily stayed in Varkala for weeks, if not months more. But the ticking clock, sadly, brought my time there to an end after just a week, over Christmas. It was a merry Christmas indeed, and now, sitting in West London with the rain hammering down outside my window, I have to ask myself: how difficult would it be to cope with a cold and frosty winter in Britain, next time around?

I might not stick around to find out.

It’s some sort of a national pastime in this country to blame the government for your problems, more so as election fever grips the nation. Don’t have a job – blame the politicians. Roof is leaking – blame the council for not fixing it. Getting too fat – blame the NHS for not providing adequate support to obese people. It’s remarkable how Britons expect mollycoddling by the government in every aspect of their lives and then have gall enough to turn around and say they are living in a nanny state, under constant scrutiny by big brother. Individual responsibility and conscientiousness it seems are slowly becoming extinct traits in this country. And nowhere is this more palpable than in the massive problem Britain faces of caring for its elderly where as a leading newspaper put it, a ‘£6 billion black hole’ in funding is emerging. As somebody from India, where state sponsored care is something unheard of, this to me is a unique problem.

According to the Economist magazine every one person in five in Britain will be over 65 years old and those over 85 would have doubled by 2026. Moreover it quotes a government statistic which reckons that half of all men and two thirds of women will require care and support in their old age. At present many poor pensioners get free assistance through their local councils who are already feeling the pressure of increasing demand and tight budgets. This, as uncovered by several media exposés has severely compromised the quality of care (helpless grandpas lying in their feces for days on end, 90 year olds being fed Quavers crisps for supper because the care worker is too strapped for time) which is very often outsourced to private companies who’ve bid the lowest amount.

The truth is, the government simply cannot afford to care of all its wise folk. And despite proclamations by Gordon Brown that he will establish a National Care Service, he is only too aware of what a gargantuan challenge elderly care poses at a time when the money taps are drying up and the number of pensioners is raising. No wonder then that this week, the Health Secretary Andy Burnham called for a cross party conference to consider sweeping reforms of the existing system, whereby there would be provisions to make people pay for their own care through things like a mandatory state insurance scheme or the very innovative £20,000 death tax levied on your estate for those less eager to save during their lifetime.

Whichever of the plans floated is finally passed, there is undoubtedly going to be a huge backlash among voters who seem to think it is their god given birthright to be cared for by the government, so that they can leave behind an inheritance for their kids. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation at least a million old people despite having a net worth of a £1, 00,000 in the form of homes still qualify for care benefits because they have insufficient liquid income flows to pay for their own care. Would it then really be a crime to levy a charge on these people after their deaths? I don’t think so.

On a broader level though, even as discussions on how to monetarily solve this problem carry on, this whole issue taking political centre stage, just stinks of how irresponsible and egocentric western societies are becoming. It is yet another reflection of how we’ve shirked our responsibility and passed the buck on to the government when it should in fact be playing only a peripheral role into the whole affair. Caring for the aged is primarily a family responsibility, not a government obligation and we seem to have forgotten that. In India, like in many other countries, old people living and being cared for by younger ones in the family was, and still is to a large extent the norm. It works well in keeping the family structure and support systems alive. Of course with large scale urbanization and the rise of nuclear families, things are changing. But since government care is largely absent in India (which isn’t exactly the way to go either, since there ought to be some way through either tax breaks, medical help etc to ease the burden on severely constrained households), families continue to fulfill their responsibilities, however inconvenient it may be to do so. The concept of old age homes is on the rise, but there is still a stigma attached to it, and it is seen as something meant only for the helpless.

And it ought to be, I think. What sort of justice is it to leave your elders rotting away in some care home, turning your backs on them when they need you the most? Over a 3rd of the older people in Britain live alone and 4,80,000 pensioners today are living in long term residential care, having been forced to sell their homes to foot the average £25,000 bill annually. I doubt, rather sincerely hope this isn’t the way India goes as it becomes more prosperous and ‘westernized’. Even with all its progress and changing social attitudes, thankfully family values still play a big role and hopefully will continue to do so.

At the end of it, however professional elderly care gets, no amounts of it can compensate for the basic human feeling of being wanted and surrounded by loved ones when you are at your most vulnerable. At the most reforms can ease pressure off the treasury and ensure better quality care, but it can’t tackle the basic problem that is the premise of all of this – a lack of psychological wellbeing among the elderly because of the isolation they face. Maybe it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee! After all, what goes around comes around and one day we all will be in the same boat…