Are you sure you’ll never grow old, never retire?

In the year 1989 I read in one of the Sinhala newspapers a letter to the editor titled kisida mahalu nowana tharunayo (Young men who will never grow old). It was a tongue-in-cheek piece by a clearly piqued senior citizen. He was chiding a group of young men who had teased him, calling out to him ey naakiyaa! ‘Hey! Old man!’ is a poor translation.

Balu Ratnesar, 80, currently domiciled outside Sri Lanka and retired public servant sent me a set of slides with pithy sayings about the elderly, especially the realities of old age, all inscribed on a set of water-colours by Marcel Reynaert. Among them, this: ‘Young people travel in groups, adults travel in pairs and old people walk alone.’

It is true isn’t it, we tend to think that old age happens to other people, don’t we? Sure, we know we get old, but do we dwell too much on being old, do we? Here’s an example.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the issue of access, focusing on flaws in regulation and architecture that make things difficult for those who suffer from all kinds of disabilities, temporary or otherwise. I wrote that we erroneously tend to think of people in crutches or wheelchairs when we hear the word ‘disabled’, pointing out that there should be sensitive in both law and architecture to those who are sick and old. Interestingly, most of the comments received were not from those who are usually seen to be ‘disabled’, but from the elderly. To be honest, this is not something I expected.

Ratnesar’s old-age issue is not about that kind of access. It is about pensions and the difficulties that pensioners are made to undergo to receive money from the relevant state agencies. His complaint is essentially one of gross insensitivity on the part of officers entrusted to handle pension-related issues.

He has written to the Pensions Director on numerous occasions, he informs me, regarding what he believes are infringements on his rights to receive and disburse his pensions to relations in Sri Lanka. He refers to a recent circular outlining punitive rules and points out, correctly, the gross injustice of such rules being applied only to retired public servants and not to ex-parliamentarians, pensioners who previously worked in public corporations and banks.

In his letter to the Director, Ratnesar had stated the following: ‘for nearly four years I tried to get your department to pay me my pension entitlement. Nothing happened, nor were any of my letters replied; till I was able to get the Secretary to the President and the Editor of the Island to intervene on my behalf. Within weeks, my file which could not be found for four years surfaced and all my entitlements were paid within a month.

Your average pensioner is not a Balu Ratnesar, able to get people in high places to intervene on his behalf. Even in his case, we must note, took four years to get the matter sorted out. Four years is a long time in an old person’s life. I can’t even begin to imagine the anxieties, sense of helplessness and frustrations that such incompetence and inefficiency on the part of officials can cause a retiree.

The Pensions Department clearly wants to streamline operations, deal with fraud and weed out non-existent pensioners, but as Ratnesar points out they are going about it in a wrong and even insulting manner, especially for pensioners living abroad.

A ‘displaced pensioner’ has outlined some of the key issues in a an article published in the website ‘transcurrents’.

“The requirement that a bank account to be opened in a specified branch of a stipulated bank (People’s Bank, Queen’s Branch) and conditions imposed on the right of the pensioner to operate his/her bank account are unduly restrictive, plainly unreasonable and legally questionable. It seems to limit the right of the account holder who is resident abroad to withdraw his/her own money only when in Sri Lanka.

It also seems to prohibit the right of the account holder to place a standing order via this account to meet a regular expenditure, or meet expenses in Sri Lanka by issuing cheques while being broad. It also makes it impossible for pensioners, resident abroad to use their pension money from this account to financially help their kith and kin on a regular basis, or make arrangements with the bank to meet their financial obligations within Sri Lanka.”

Underlying all this is the gross ignorance of the fact that pensioners belong to an age segment that is prone to and usually suffer from one or more limiting ailments such as angina, arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and amnesia.

What kind of nation are we if we cannot appreciate and be sensitive to the problems faced by our elders, those who in one way or another brought us to where we are. Of course, we can say that they were responsible for the ‘bad’ as well as the ‘good’, but there is nothing to be gained by painting them all with a dismissive brush, is there? Isn’t there some virtue in helping those who are no longer able to do things for themselves? I remember the harassment that my father had to undergo to collect his pension immediately after retirement.

He was the last Ceylon Civil Service officer to retire, had no savings, and no other form of income. And the older one gets, the more difficult it is to fight boorish officials and bank clerks.

The old, typically, give up, because they no longer have the strength to fight such battles to conclusion. This is the key factor that incompetent and inefficient officials count on. They can get away with a lot of things because pensioners don’t have the kind of fight that someone in his/her, say, would have.

There is one thing that such officials should understand. They will hit 55 (or 60 or whatever the retirement age is where they work) someday. They too will be subject to the eternal truth pertaining to birth, decay and death, the jaathi, jaraa, marana. Most of them will be afflicted with one or more of the above mentioned ailments. They will lose the will to fight. They can very well be subjected to the kind of bullying that some of them currently engage in.

It is in their interest, then, to ensure that whatever procedures are formulated, it is done with utmost care and with great sensitivity to the particularities of old-age issues. And respect for the elderly. It is their father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, suffering from angina, arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, amnesia etc., etc., that they are regulating for. And of course they are regulating for themselves come retirement day.

They too will walk alone. The least they can do for themselves, then, is to make sure the path is not booby-trapped because even the simplest fall can break brittle bones and cause permanent crippling or even death.

[email protected]