The Hindu Business Line : All the (r)age…

As a nation, we eagerly look forward to trumping the world with our sizeable young workforce. At the same time, we also happen to be one of the oldest civilisations that sets great store by ancient wisdom. Here, older is, more often than not, equalled to wiser. Many of our netas are nothing less than veteran politicians and even our heroes on the silver screen are the “evergreen” superstars. And when business leaders such as Ratan Tata talk of retiring, there’s collective disbelief.

Halfway across the globe, as the US pits one presidential candidate against another, the WSJ surmises that age is likely to become an electoral issue.

John McCain at 72 will be facing off a much younger Barack Obama at 47.

“But in a country that is rapidly ageing while staying healthy longer, what does old age mean, and how much should it matter?” the Journal asks.

It however reports that corporate America remains wary of older people with misgivings about their “memories, energy levels and technological savvy”.

But there are enough people who argue that rather than age, it’s a person’s state of health that matters. There’s a lot to be said for life experience and accumulated wisdom, according to David Reuben, head of geriatric medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who points out that “Mathematicians do their best work in their 20s; orchestra conductors and diplomats peak in their 60s or 70s”.

And with the 65-plus population expected to double in 30 years, “longer life will have a huge effect on everything from immigration policy to public transit to housing… Retirement at age 65 made sense when most workers poured steel, plowed fields and mined coal. Today’s workers – still vital and healthy, for the most part – want nothing to do with lowering their Social Security-benefits age.”

And, so, will a rapidly ageing society vote for the younger or the older of the presidential candidates?

Sick leave (sic)

Paid leave, casual leave, leave with loss of pay… leave, by all means. But sick leave? There’s that little matter of a medical certificate that’s prescribed under personnel law. And while schoolchildren may cajole a parent to produce a sick note for the teacher, the grownups themselves find it more difficult to “feel under the weather” to escape the workplace. The Independent now reports that the UK’s NHS is investigating a Web site that sells fake sick notes for £25 each! The notes are printed with real doctors’ names and stamped and signed too for good measure. Doctorsnotestore.com promises delivery within 48 hours. The report quotes an NHS spokesman who warned of prosecution for those caught using the fake notes. However, "Selling sick notes is not illegal so a person could type one up and sell it without being prosecuted. It only becomes illegal when you receive a payment or advantage, for instance paid time off work, because of its use."While the Web site specifies that the notes can only be used for “novelty purposes”, customer feedbacks however gleefully vouch for their efficacy in wangling extra “sick leave”!

Friend’s place… and mine

Think of Friends, the hugely popular sitcom, and one of the enduring images is of pals living, through the thick and thin of it all, in those tastefully-appointed shared apartments. Of course many have wondered how a group of youngsters, often hard on financial luck, could afford these splendid spaces in the hugely pricey Big Apple.

But here’s Time magazine’s “story of friends – just friends – who buy houses together because they are young and don’t have a lot of money but smell opportunity in a soft real estate market and want to start building equity ASAP, even if it comes before the wife, kids and golden retriever.”

Describing them as communal homeowners or Co-hos, it gives the examples of several such young men and women across US cities who “split the mortgage, the tax break, the cost of upkeep – and the pride of being homeowners a few years out of college”.

Besides friendship and trust, of course, the arrangement calls for loads of open communication on financial and other details such as long-term commitments. But “for a Friends-reared generation that is remaining single longer, being housemates makes perfect sense not just financially but socially too”.

Malathi Ramanathan