The big trouble with retired gentlemen....

Retirement and life thereafter can be quite traumatic for men who have led a busy life, a large part of it outside their homes. The forced confinement to the house that follows retirement does not go down well with most men. Dethroned from their official position, they suddenly find themselves like a king without a kingdom, a clock work without its key. Beleaguered by a sense of insecurity over their finances and disheartened by a lack of purpose in everyday life, these men often drive their families up the wall.

This blog is a humorous take on the antics of those gentry who have called it a day to hit the hay, but are yet to come to terms with their superannuation.  While the issue may be serious, I have tried to find humour in the sticky situations these men precipitate (of which I have abundant experience), and appeal to you all to read it as such.

It’s all about money, Honey!                   

Two things that a retired gentleman has to contend with from day one:

·         Less money to manage his expenditure, and

·         More time, in fact, all the time, to brood over it.

So the first thing that he does, or overdoes in most cases, is to attempt to tighten his purse strings; in doing so, he pulls the strings so hard that they end up as the proverbial noose around the family’s neck.

His repeated scanning of power bills, telephone bills and grocery bills to identify areas where he can cut corners starts as a past time, but quickly degenerates into a fixation.

Soon enough, his wife finds her carefully-balanced family budget being subject to a C&AG-type scrutiny. She is interrogated in detail over a wide spectrum of issues right from:

·         her choice of groceries (why can’t we buy masoor dal instead of toor dal, it’s a lot cheaper!)

·         her wisdom in opting for specific brands of shampoos (why use these chemicals on our
            heads? Won’t shikakai do?)

·         her plea to replace the broken kitchen mixer (can’t you hand grind the masala?)

·         her decision to take a cab to a friend’s wedding (But, bus no: 309 stops just opposite the
            venue!)

·         down to even her basic need to make a phone call (why can’t you simply Whatsapp? It’s
            free!).  

After years of running the household with less finances and lesser help from her husband, she is unlikely to take kindly to this audit. Add to this, his sermons on how she could bring more efficiency into her household management, and she has had it!

What follows is inevitable! Confrontation, followed by cold war!

In the early days of his retired life, when hubby dearest offers to accompany his wife for grocery shopping, she is pleasantly surprised and looks forward to having some quiet time with him. But, alas! Her expectations are to be belied sooner that you can say ‘bazooka’!

Her miseries start at the grocer’s from whom her spouse demands a small discount on MRP (like what the big retailers offer); at the medical shop, he insists on a senior citizen’s rebate; at the restaurant, he tries to negotiate an additional free serving of chutney for his idlies; the milkman, he chastises for rounding off small change to his favour, and the vegetable vendor, he accuses of cheating and demands to inspect his weighing balance.

 Who did these people think he was, Mukesh Ambani? Don’t they know, he no longer gets a raise (pun unintended ;)) these days! Does anybody (in a veiled reference to his family members) know how woefully inadequate his pension? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...... All the way back home, the poor woman has to hear him rant on how everybody is out to cheat him and how nobody understands the difficulties of a pensioner.

When he is not giving the world around him a hard time, he keeps himself busy planning his next attack on two parties he loves to hate - his banker and the taxman. Visiting the bank becomes his most favourite past time and twice a week, his banker receives a visit from his disgruntled client demanding why certain tax has been deducted, a fixed deposit closed or some faulty debits not yet reversed.  No new-age banking facilities, be it the ATMs, net banking or phone banking, can keep our senior citizen off the bank premises. It is a different story that his every visit to the bank ends on a disappointing note as he had expected his bank balance to grow like Jack's bean stalk but had to eventually reckon with the hard fact that money grows neither on trees nor on bean stalks!

If the banker is a foe with whom he can fight an intimate duel, the elusive taxman remains frustratingly remote and inaccessible, but with tentacles long enough to chop off substantial chunks of his meagre savings before he knows it!

Dressed to kill 

The retirement complex these gentlemen suffer from is best manifested in the way they dress. On this parameter, the retired gentry fall into two categories: 

One, the category of men who dress to make a statement - although his NRI son has gifted him some nice Lacoste t-shirts, our man chooses to wear his old,  tattered, worn out clothes, which have been lying in his wardrobe since prehistoric times . Ask him why he is so dreadfully dressed and he will shoot back that an old retired man like him was free to roam around in his langhoti and nobody in the world would care two hoots!

The gentlemen falling into the second category unleash terror in a different manner – they raid their son’s wardrobe for his jeans and t-shirts in a naive attempt to look young! They dye their hair jet black but are too lazy to shave of their greying facial hair. The resulting effect is cataclysmic!  Top it up with their demands to have their hair (or what is left of it) dressed at a unisex parlour and to hang out at a coffee joint, and the torture is complete!

The idly-vada economic theory

One other defining trait of our distinguished citizen is his favourite discussion topic of ‘idly-vada economics’. As he grows older, he weaves a time warp around himself and finds inordinate pleasure in repeatedly reminiscing the (g)olden years of his life, when a pair of idlies dunked in mouth-watering sambar cost merely an ‘anna’ (a denomination equalling one-sixteenth of a rupee).

His fondness for food frequently drives him to a nearby Udupi restaurant (sometimes on the sly ;)) where he tucks in a plate of idly-vada with gusto. For him, the cost of a single plate of idly-vada is the barometer of the prevailing inflation. It is sort of like the purchasing power parity concept; call it the ‘idly-vada parity index’, if you will. So every purchase in the house is equated to the cost of a plate of idly-vada and judged whether the purchase is rightly priced or over-valued. It works somewhat like this:

A movie ticket at a single-screen theatre for Rs 75 equals 1.5 times the cost of the plate of idly-vada: 

Verdict: Appropriately priced!

 A ticket for the same movie in a multiplex for Rs 300 equals 6 plates of idly-vada :

Verdict: Horribly overpriced!!

'Yaadon ki baarat'....

His pet obsession with idly-vada can still be discounted as a mild quirk, compared with his brash decision to take over the kitchen from the woman of the house, who has been running it for years. 

It begins with frequent flashbacks of his mom’s or grandmom’s recipes, which he coaxes his wife into recreating for him. If his overtures fail, he jumps into the fray to try his own hand at cooking his favourite dishes.  What follows is mayhem!  Suffice to say, at the end of his culinary exploits, the kitchen resembles the Kalinga war field crossed with the Corporation dumpyard!

And let's not even talk about all those sweets, chocolates and other goodies that frequently go missing from the kitchen!  

I am the master of my cubbyhole universe 

Yet another exasperating habit of our gentleman is his total hijack of the morning newspapers (everybody else has to wait till he is done) and his complete monopolisation of the television set (nobody else gets to hold the remote).

Newspaper reading is an early morning ritual, as vital to his existence as the air he breathes.  He reads the papers from end to end, critically analysing each news item and churning out his own theories along the way.  He has more views on how this country should be run than the PMO’s think tank. When he doesn’t find good reception for his ideas among family members, he starts to flood the mailboxes of newspapers with their ‘letters to the editor’.

His unsatiable romance with television is yet another matter of major heart burn for the family. All day long, the family is forced to watch nothing but the news channels and re-runs of B&W movies from the 1950’s and 60’s. Not easy, that one! 

Excuse me! I am a senior citizen!

Despite playing dangerously with the world around, he escapes unscathed by uttering four powerful words  – “I am a senior citizen” – words that pull the pull the air out of the opponent’s lungs, much like Shashi Kapoor’s, “Mere paas maa hain” line in the Hindi movie ‘Deewar’.

All his conversations with the world at large invariably begin with him mentioning his age, as if it were an esteemed title he has earned. But he is also shrewd enough to use this as a trump card to:

·         jump queues (Madam, I am a senior citizen, I can’t stand for too long; can I please go before you)

·         excuse himself from attending functions he is not interested in (Sorry Sir, I am touching 70; of late, my mobility has become very restricted; I won’t be able to make it to the event....)

·         avoid the ignominy of getting frisked at malls and other public places (Young man, I am 72 years old, I already have one foot in the grave, why do you think I would be interested in weapon trafficking at my age?)   and

·         crush tele-callers selling financial products (Boy, I am 68 years old ; still interested in selling me a personal loan?). 

At the end of the day, it is this magic mantra that saves our old man from the unwise and immature world around him!