The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Sunday 3 March 2013

ELDERCARE SPECIALISTS: WHAT RUBBISH!

Everything is on sale is a common observation these days. The bizarre has become routine and even emotive needs are not left untouched.

Relations are scaled up and down after calculations of their material worth. Brothers and sisters who share common roof become so distant that they do not communicate even in years. The material comparison spoils and poisons the innocent love.

In matters of love, the financial quotient has effectively killed the emotional quotient of attachment. Commitment is a word that generates a sort of repulsion. The rush to define and manipulate the word as per the liking makes it almost phobic to the puritan senses.

Yes, the bizarre has become so common. And I came across something today that extended this humiliating trend. An article in the Hindustan Times (March 3, 2013) introduced me to yet another monetized realm of relations and their emotive needs – some so-called elder-care specialists.


I have been visiting the old-age homes. It’s over two years now but I never came across this term or this bunch who trade emotions with a society-segment (our elderly) most bereft of them. After reading the article, I won’t say I was shocked, yes, but I felt low again.

I could never have imagined that there existed a money-making machine by exploiting the emotional needs of the elderly people.

Okay, to make the slate clear, the article says there are professional eldercare agencies providing services of trained care specialists by charging a professional consultancy fee. Delhi is the biggest market and the companionship cost (yes they define the time-spent with the client, the elderly, as companionship) varies between Rs. 11,000 to Rs. 25,000 based on the client as informed by the article.

What rubbish!

Where is the society heading? Okay, I am not a social worker or a puritan human being but I can say this is outrageous.

The most significant emotive requirements of an old-age are attention and an attachment evolved through understanding. One needs to be more of a patient participative listener than a studious fellow who has done an assignment to communicate with and respond to an elderly person.

Can a governess replace a mother when there is a mother? How then someone who is being paid to talk and spend time can become a source of emotional fulfillment?

Given the cost involved, such silly services can only cater to the well-to-do clientele so are still restricted. The case studies given in the article are from the affluent class.

There are millions of elderly people devoid of their basic needs and ignored by their families. At the same time, they are financially broken after spending their lives on their sons and daughters. Their pain is so much that it breaks the heart while talking to them. Any paid companionship cannot work in such cases.

Why can’t, we, as a society, come forward to offer emotional aid to them? We are a young nation it is said. Why can’t we undo the wrong done by our elders like fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers in ignoring their elders?

Why someone, irrespective of the social class, needs to pay for something that should have been his by the natural right?

Why some of us need to be paid to give the true first members of our society, our grandpas and grandmas, their due? 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/