The good can be perpetrators of evil too!

Vanavaas (Exile, Hindi; 2025)

Director: Anil Sharma

I was watching this Hindi movie with my wife. It was a melodramatic film in true Bollywood style, invoking filial piety or at least making children feel guilty for not caring for their elderly parents in their twilight years. Sending elderly parents to specialised institutions to cater to their specific needs was never in any Indian dictionary.

The aged father, a widower who still resides in the home of his deceased wife, is suffering from worsening dementia. Despite his physical incapacity, he is a proud man with his own ways of doing things and is caustic with his words. He had built a beautiful house and amassed other properties. He lives with his three adult children, their respective wives, and their children.

The father is still determined to be the head of the extended family and makes crucial family decisions. Probably due to their upbringing, the sons remain silent about the father's tantrums and idiosyncrasies. The wives constantly complain about the father's antics, but no one is willing to budge.

So, when the family made a pilgrimage to Varanasi, the six adults decided to lose their father in the crowd. Without his dementia medications, they thought he would not be able to communicate with passers-by and would not return, eventually withering away in oblivion.

For the record, Varanasi offers avenues for end-of-life care. Facilities are available for individuals diagnosed with terminal illnesses to spend their remaining days in the town, where they can be cremated and have their ashes immersed in the Ganga River afterwards. After all, the Kashi-Visvanath temple is believed to be the abode of Lord Shiva. Varanasi is supposed to be Siva's summer residence. The idea of spending one's final days in His presence makes perfect sense.

In true poetic fashion, sympathetic vagabonds from Varanasi eventually bring the father back to his family home. The children had already sold their family home and were liquidating another property.

My wife, still believing that goodness is very much alive and thriving on Earth, refuses to accept that any child would have the gumption to essentially 'kill off a parent'. In a group of six children, none would agree to stoop so low as to bite the hand that brought them into the world. She insists that the plot is one-dimensional and has deviated significantly from reality. In her mind, no way any human worth his salt would do anything like this.

Scrolling through actual crime cases over the years, I understand that the human mind has no boundaries. It is capable of performing the most profound things and, at the same time, being manipulated or brainwashed into believing the impossible. It is a common occurrence to see how one dominant character can wrap the weaker around his finger to work like an automaton. Case files from the Nuremberg trials, which document the banality of evil, are testimonies to this. In more sedate times, the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that good people can be transformed into perpetrators of evil.

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Finding the Fulcrum

 https://borderlessjournal.com/2024/09/16/finding-the-fulcrum/

I decided to care for my ailing octogenarian mother, not because she willed me a great fortune or because I have a great liking to care for the sick. Neither do I want to gaslight her for all the not-so-nice things she said about me and my family in better health all through her healthy life.

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Longevity, a boon or a curse?

This newspaper cutting has been making its rounds in many social media groups, especially amongst the senior section of our society. Understandably they embrace the silver hair stage of their lives with much trepidation. It is anybody’s guess what the future holds for each of us. We try, however, to patch up all possibilities and pave all roads for a smooth transition to the other side. As mischievous as it always is, Nature will inevitably come up with some loophole that we never expected and, thus, are ill-prepared.

The generation before us, facing an uncertain future, seeing a world war and migrating for survival, saw education and wealth as a foolproof way to prosperity. Having hardly seen anyone pass their sixth decade of life, everything was done in a hurry. They needed to educate their kids, make a territory their legacy, and save for rainy days as they slowly rode into the sunset after having the pleasure of seeing their offsprings produce offspring.

However, they should have considered the push-pull factor from their Newfoundland and their newfound longevity.

Benefiting by leaps and bounds from the stride in medical development, baby boomers are now living to years thought impossible by their parents. Unlike their parent’s world, the world had grown smaller. The world is at their feet for the millennial to step out into. As per taught to them by their parents, migration to a more prosperous land and the validation of their qualification by a white man as success, they naturally migrate overseas, leaving the old people behind.

Unfortunately, we are creatures of habit. The oldies are left behind, not because of inconvenience but for comfort. The oldies feel safe at havens familiar to them. Hence, they stayed back. Sadly the mind ages slower than the body. This spurs many sad thoughts and needs to endure the maladies of loneliness and physical pain.

Humans are the only species on Earth that nurtures their young for such a long time, and conventionally the oldies are cared for in their twilight years. This turn of events is tricky when the old live long lives at a time when the young are struggling to put their mark on their lives. Care homes and assisted living to fill the gap but can only do so much.

Should we complain about living long lives or being uncared for in our geriatric age group? Money can buy love and medical assistance; that is about it.

The mighty Hang Tuah and even the Pandavas, after they felt unwanted after achieving unsurmountable tasks in their lives, decided to wander off into the wilderness of Gunung Ledang and Meru Hills, respectively, to be one with Nature. Just saying….

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