Senior Citizens' Learning Disability!

One of the incontrovertible facts of life is that a recently retired man (RRM) is a harried one.  More often than not. Apart from the fact that an RRM never fully anticipates the travails of a jobless existence and that his agonised mental state induces a feeling of kinship with the furniture and fixtures at home, he has a more troublesome fire-hoop to jump through.  That is, the persistent pressure from all around, including folks at home, to begin afresh, learn something new, `reinvent' himself, what not!!   People come around and dust you and wipe you, in metaphorical terms, from time to time and ensure you are looking presentable.  But the focus shifts permanently to teach the old pony some new tricks. The brilliant rationale for this is otherwise the pony isn't happy, but no one ever asks the pony to confirm this.  If only they do, believe me, a lot of people would be spared a whole load of angst!  Personally, I didn't suffer through much of this because I continued to work part-time after retirement and when that was done, I happily shifted to multiple activities including golf!  And, all this while, my dear wife was busy with full time work herself, God bless her.  But I have heard of heart-rending stories of the perilous life of retired men, primarily because of the intent of the world around them to somehow `renovate' the old fogey.  Overall, such overweeningly ambitious drives unfailingly leave the men feeling more inadequate than ever, vulnerable and exposed in their new career of unemployment!

A while ago, a RRM was minding his own business (or the lack of it) and listening to MSS's Dasano Madiko when he was rudely interrupted by his bitter half.  She rightly or wrongly always assumed a position of superiority to look condescendingly down on the other half!  'Why don't you learn Sanskrit', she asked.  The provocation for this was not any urge to convert him into a linguist, but just to get her invaded space (she had it all to herself for forty years) at home vacated for a breather.  'Or Kannada, since classes were being conducted in the community'?  She felt that Sanskrit would help our man to comprehend the pith of religious and spiritual texts and Kannada would be very useful for communication with gardeners, drivers, electricians, delivery staff et al?  The husband had no penchant for languages anyway and obviously had no leanings towards spirituality or conversations with the proletariat.  To ward off the assault, he just asked one legitimate question as to how the wife had managed all the workmen for decades without proficiency in Kannada. Wrong move and there ensued a war of words; a torrent from the wife and stony silence from the chastened guy. He subsequently rationalised with us that in Bangalore, Thamizh is as current as any other language and one can get by, which is true.  He dared not advance this logic with his wife, who had already petulantly declared that the RRM should go back to work somewhere, full time, whatever be the work.

Many RRMs have complained that they have been bulldozed into learning Yoga by others at home who cannot even bend to touch their calf muscle, let alone the toes.  When he tried to argue, his wife shut him out saying she would also learn Yoga when she retired from kitchen and other household chores; the RRF judiciously decided that everyone was better off with the wife in the kitchen than in the Yoga class. And dragged his ageing body painfully to the knotty encounter with the Yoga teacher.  I know an imp of an old man, who was forcibly thrust into learning yoga, who, when asked to touch the toe while sitting and stretching the legs out, did that gleefully and successfully. Only the toe belonged to someone else in the immediate proximity and the entire class was left giggling. They say Yoga can be learnt at any stage and that may be true, but I am yet to see any manifestation of this in an old person known to me.  The pain in the aftermath of the class invariably ends up identifying to the sufferers, many bones and muscles they had no prior knowledge of.  So, this old bandicoot just did what he could to avoid further harassment. For a month he dutifully got out of the house with a water bottle and a few biscuits his wife insisted he take for nourishment, exactly at the appointed yoga class time.  Sat somewhere else out of all sight for an hour and half and returned home after consuming the repast, groaning with faked aches, providing much satisfaction to the wife.  This worked; until a lady asked his wife `Why is your husband not coming for yoga class nowadays'?  It took a lot of persuasive confessions from the old man that with his aching body, his vajrasana attempt was looking like someone praying in a church, sarpasana was more like a man struggling under water and so on for the wife finally to relent reluctantly.

Some precocious ladies, of which there are multitudes, have tremendous foresight.  They can sagaciously visualise their spouses being carried home, post yoga, in  tangled bundles and left in a heap, possibly requiring urgent surgical intervention to untangle and restoration of the body to status-quo-ante.  They smartly nudge the men towards Taichi, the gentle exercise form originating from China. Not that the country of origin or the exercise itself matters, because women are just looking to displace their husbands temporarily and even a medium-paced ceremonial dance-form from Congo would have done the job.  With its very elegant, slow movements, Taichi seems to lend itself for indulgence at old age.  But one agitated RRM had violent objections to a few aspects of this.  That it was awfully slow even for seniors, the accompanying music was cloying and it was nothing but super-slow-yoga anyway.  He spent more time arguing that the Chinese just lifted yoga from very ancient India and slowed it down to suit their own lives, than training.  That is the crux of the matter.  RRMs don't want anything half rigorous as Yoga itself and they don't want anything slower either.  By now one should know, these guys are just looking for excuses not to learn anything new; but then, who is listening??

Feeble men, with whom history is littered, who cowered in the presence of their spouses during their working days, tend to lose control completely after retirement and get fully domesticated in a hurry.  To make up for all their absence from the kitchen scene earlier, the wife plunges them into learning some chores around the place and then some cooking also. With disastrous outcome, of course.  Production results are so unpalatable that even the makers struggle to consume a morsel of what they cooked up. My own guess is that these oldies are cunning devils, even as they are docile and try to take refuge in the syndrome of senior's learning disability just so that they would be promptly banished from the kitchen forever by the rest of the household.  After all what is at stake is what most people live for!!

Another RRM was inducted into chores like shopping for grocery and vegetables.  Even after a prolonged apprenticeship stint, the lady was patently disappointed with the quality of stuff that he procured. The man, in turn, made it clear that she was not the only one who was unhappy; he hated what he was made to do but he was trying his best.  When she visited the market after a lapse of a few days, she discovered that the unhappiness bug had spread to the vendors also.  As a chorus everyone complained about her husband; the way he did his bargaining, his harsh exchanges with them, his unilateral price fixing, his tendency to damage vegetables during the selection process etc.  They actually threatened to blacklist the husband as well as the entire family for the trauma he was causing.  The wife withdrew the man from the frontline post-haste, to avoid having to go a distant market.  Not worth the trouble.

My dear wife read through this piece and said acidly 'so all retired men should just sit and watch TV or play cards with friends, when they are not eating or drinking'??  I said `No, without making the poor guy feel like a useless novice, pushed into learning something, get him to share the work burden.  Gently does it.  After all, would these women who have been at home for decades, want to go out into an office environment at retirement age?  To learn something new'?

I am still waiting for the seemingly benign response, soaked in sarcasm.  I know it will come sooner than later.