Middle as a hobby for retired... As appeared in Tribune on May 5.... Bears, bulls and the blues by Raj Kadyan
PEOPLE who lead active working life do have adjustment problems after retirement. The first problem is about keeping busy. Those who make the mistake of keeping fit during their working life are the worse off. They feel not unlike the race-horse, all upholstered and rearing to go, but with no track to run on. The second problem is fiscal. While the government pays pension for its employees, its adequacy can be gauged by the incident narrated by a friend. He had to apply for a PAN card and while mentioning the 'source of income' in the application form, he wrote 'government pension'. The clerk at the window refused to admit the form since he considered the indicated source of income inadequate for survival and suspected another hidden source. Any pensioner would agree that the learned clerk could not be considered to be even narrowly off the mark. The authorities that calculated the pension did not have, as the cliché goes, the real feel of the pulse; nor do they know about the pulses one could say. There are many 'incidentals' that are not covered by the experts. For example, the pension does not cater for the Diwali 'bakshish' for the postman, the lineman, the electrician, the plumber, the locality watchman, the gardener looking after the municipality park and others. Most of them you see only once a year, and may be it is for the better. If you do not give the 'bakshish' you are quite likely to spend your days cut off from the world with your taps dry and your bulbs cold. My wife had hired a maidservant to do our cooking. She stays on the premises while her resident husband works as a night-shift tailor in a garment factory. She is good with her work. After she completed one year, she asked for a bonus. My wife passed on her demand to me. "No problem," I said cheerily, "the moment I get my bonus from the government, I will pass on your share." I do not suppose she grasped the irony in the humour. But since that day the morning tea hasn't been as steaming hot. On wifely urging and on a friend's advice to create additional income, I played the stock market. I started reading business news ardently. I even entertained experts who advertised their respective investment empires in eloquent terms. I was taken in by the most glib and handed over my meagre savings to him. I have never seen him since. I only see the monthly statements that show that I am left with only 45 per cent of what I had invested at the beginning of last year. I have to take some hard decisions. The house whitewashing necessitated by massive seepage marks of the last monsoons will have to wait. 'In any case, these will reappear during the next rains', I console myself. We had bought a small second-hand car before I retired. It creaks and groans and needs to be changed urgently. But with the fuel prices having more than doubled since its purchase, we don't trouble it much these days. And walking is always healthy as every health guru says. -- With best wishes S Chander
