The world is tired of old men but the feeling is not mutual. Many countries are run by old men, many gigantic corporations too, and all housing societies too it would seem on some days. In response, the world has contempt for old men. For not receding into irrelevance quietly. This is odd, because being old is the future of us all, and what some old men have demonstrated is that ageing need not be the same as dying.

What must have been going on in the head of Joe Biden as he prepared to run for office once again at the age of 81.“Without me, the wrong kind of people will run America. I am the answer”? At the time, no American presidential candidate had been that old. When a special counsel appointed by his own administration said that he is ‘…a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory…” he was enraged. Donald Trump mocked Biden’s age in more cruel ways. But Trump himself is 78 now.

How is it that the world has so much contempt for the old who will not quit, especially old men, yet they manage to control so much of the world?

The young are jealous of the young, the world is jealous of the young, it has too many opinions about them. People reward the old for denying the success of their peers. But the endurance of the old does not interest me so much as their desire for power and respect. Desire is life. People without desire are not enlightened; they are walking corpses.

All around me I see the old who have meekly receded into retirement and they struggle to fill their days. They feign concern for a wounded delivery boy, just for the chance to talk; they plot trips to hospitals purely  for entertainment; former captains of industry today pick fights with maids and drivers.

But this is what the world wants from the old. What do most people want from their ancient parents? Don’t do anything interesting that will make you fall? Be with other old people, don’t get involved in too many things, assume that the lives of other people are more important and more precious? Be alive and be dead at once? It convenient for us to imagine that all that normal old people want do is to withdraw into a forest, and that they don’t it only because there are not many forests around anymore. But is this what you would like to be when you are old.

Being old is the only real outcaste left. I can say that even in a country like India. A lot of caste strife is misunderstood as oppression. Indians do practise caste but most days it is more classification than discrimination. Yet there is a group of people whom everyone looks down upon — the old.

One of the great old men of our times is Clint Eastwood. At 93 he is in the middle of directing his next film. On his persistence with life he once said, “I try to get up and be productive, and don’t let the old man in.”

Most successful old men were healthy young men who were either genetically lucky, or who trained their bodies to get lucky. As a Malayalee I know how common and easy it can be for the old to be healthy. Health and fitness are two different things. Fitness is tough and of no importance to most people. But it is truly within the reach of most people to age with enough health to work and to long for something, and come in the way of the undeserving young who think they have the first right to the new world just because they were born in an absurd year.

A longing that is taboo for old men is sex. It is possible that old men do not lose interest in sex, and I really hope they don’t, but what interests them sexually is no longer decent for them to seek. Because it is the instinct of the world to protect young women from old men. “If the old men hog the young women, what will be the future of the species?” JM Coetzee writes in ‘Disgrace’, “Half of literature is about it: young women struggling to escape from under the weight of old men, for the sake of the species.”

A way of the world is that it would do a lot to help young women escape from the under the weight of old men, but surrender everything else, like national character and whole destinies to the patriarchs.

I am not a fan of old men. Even as a kid, I could never fully believe that the old had some great wisdom in them. In fact, I thought most of them were just kids in ageing bodies. That is the very meaning of evil – children who are not children. Even so, the natural right of the young to replace the old is plain absurd because the smartness of the young is more overrated than the wisdom of the old. Most people in the 20s know nothing. And a 30-year-old is only a 20-year-old who has learned how to pretend he knows something. People in their 40s are infected with a sense of doom and failure, and they already are in the infancy of old age. In their 50s people have already give up.

This is why some ambitious old men thrive.

They are still better than most of the world. And they protect themselves by ignoring the most lethal wisdom that has influenced the world — that adaptation is survival. Old men survive by not changing to their external environment. That is why Max Planck said, “…truth doesn’t triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light but rather because its opponents eventually die…”

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