This morning, as I sipped my coffee and scanned the news, I nearly spilled my hot brew. There on the world stage, strutting about and shaping the destiny of millions, are three young men: Donald Trump at seventy-nine, Narendra Modi at seventy-five, and Vladimir Putin at seventy-two. I say young men because that’s exactly what they are made out to be by their nations.
Strong, decisive, powerful!
Not doddering, not dithering, not even deserving of pity because of any wrinkles or walking sticks.
And then I thought of us. Poor us! We cling to the belief that at sixty you’re finished, at sixty-one you’re obsolete, and at sixty-two you’re a walking liability.
So, we retire people off! At exactly the age when the brain has gathered wisdom, the heart has softened with experience, and the hands have steadied after decades of practice, we push them into irrelevance.
Tell me, why should a surgeon with steady fingers, a teacher who knows his Shakespeare better at seventy than he did at forty, or an efficient manager be sent home with a pension slip and a farewell garland? Just because the calendar says so? Meanwhile, Trump, Modi, and Putin are busily signing treaties, wagging nuclear fingers, and deciding the fate of generations.
It’s not just about them. The bigger tragedy is that most over sixty start believing they are old. They stop learning, stop working, stop reinventing. “I’m retired,” they say, as if it’s a disease. They shuffle off to bed early, fold their newspapers with finality, and look suspiciously at anyone who still thinks of them as useful.
Well, my friends, look again! The world is being shaped by chronologically old, biologically young men. That’s the lesson. Age is in the head. You can choose to count your wrinkles or you can count your years of hard- won experience and keep going.
Now I’m not saying an eighty-year-old needs to wrestle in the Olympics or run the hundred-meter dash. But I am saying that maybe it’s time you stopped treating sixty-seventy-eighty like exit gates.
Treat it instead as the restart button.
If three heads of state can decide on war and peace, on oil and sanctions, on democracy and dictatorship—at an age when most of us are put out to pasture—then surely your father can keep running his business, your mother can still lead her NGO, and your grandmother can keep learning the piano.
So next time your seventy-year-old dad says, “I think I’m too old for this,” hand him the morning paper with a picture of these three young men. And say, “Dad, if Trump, Modi, and Putin are still young enough to shake the world, you’re certainly young enough to do the same!”
Then put on you TV and watch, or let them watch these three young men hogging the limelight...!
The Author conducts an online, eight session Writers and Speakers Course. If you’d like to join, do send a thumbs-up to WhatsApp number 9892572883 or send a message to bobsbanter@gmail.com
