Here’s my question. What is our stance on old people? For the longest time, we were not just told that older was better, but lest we forget it, also foisted with really bad adages regarding them (I’ll jog your memory and ruin your day by reminding you of the most annoying of them — old is gold). Anyone old you ran into — grandparents or unrelated geriatrics — was to be treated with respect, because when people said old, they meant wise. Old(er) people knew better than you, they had lived lives of enduring adventures and enviable deprivations and were all the more divine for it, went the argument.

Then in the 1990s, the country liberalised and suddenly everything changed. Old yielded to young. We were cashing in our ‘demographic dividend’, economists told us, as though the capital invested in women’s wombs had finally landed on a profitable stock. Everyone began to be endowed with cool. You were either “with it” or without anything. Like the old man in the Vodafone ad, you could earn your street cred only by beating the young at being young. Old is now cold, a liability one must constantly apologise for.

The reason I bring this up is because of what’s been playing politically in the last couple of weeks. The sulking old guard of the BJP, LK Advani, 86, and Jaswant Singh, 76, in particular, have been thrown into professional obscurity and asked, in a manner of speaking, to sit quietly somewhere and read the Ramayan or whatever it is that old people read. On the other side, Congress’ Jairam Ramesh (who turns 60 in four days), came out and said party leaders above 70 must retire. Even though members of his party were quick to jump (well, as quick as arthritis allows you) and clarify that it was Ramesh’s personal opinion and not one shared by the party, it can safely be said that for old people across political parties, the writing is on the wall and it is in a large font. Indian politics is the last bastion of doddering old men and here too, it is now clear, there’s a premium on youth over experience.

It isn’t because I am crossing over from one category to the other (okay, it’s a little bit because of that) but relegating all old people as unproductive, and therefore unimportant, seems neither fair nor wise. People now live for about twice as long as they did in the 1940s, and to draw line at age 60 or 70 as the end of any work-related accomplishment is a parameter that seems dated. To assume all old people are irrelevant is just as ignorant as assuming all young people are going to be Mark Zuckerberg.

Darrell Worthy, a Texas A&M psychologist, conducted a study to understand how old people make decisions compared to the young. The first part of the experiment involved a controlled game of chance. Participants were asked to make four choices to see which of these options yielded a higher aggregate. It required identification of patterns but mostly involved taking risks. The younger lot, 18- to 26-year-olds, aced this test. The second test was a simulation of extracting oxygen in Mars. Participants had to decide which of the two options they would use to extract oxygen and then transfer it to larger tanks. This test involved understanding past patterns and using that knowledge to make decisions. The amount of oxygen extracted and successfully transferred to the larger tank by the older group (60- to 84-year olds) was far higher than the younger lot.

Most studies prior to this had shown a clear bias towards younger participants in being able to take better decisions. Worthy’s study, however, makes a distinction in the kind of decisions. Under choice — independent conditions (where the choice you make is independent of your previous choice), younger people perform better. They were more efficient in identifying the choices that gave higher rewards. Whereas, in decisions that are made under choice-dependent conditions (where each choice you make will have a bearing on your next choice), older people fare better. “In real-world situations, it’s likely more common that the rewards available depend on previous choices made, similar to Experiment 2. The advantage found for older adults in this experiment may have been partially due to age-based expertise in decision-making situations where current decisions will impact future possible outcomes,” Worthy says. For want of another word, he calls this wisdom.

The argument against doddering old men running the country is that they are unable to understand the aspirations of the large majority of the population, which is under 25. It is a valid argument. Certainly, the older you are, the harder it is to understand the digital, ever-morphing environment we live in now. Despite that, although 18-year-olds certainly would be the best people to take on a trip to Las Vegas, if it is the 60- to 84-year-olds who are likely to keep us alive on Mars, I dare say we should all sit down and think about this a bit before hustling them out of Parliament.

(Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of Would You Like Some Bread with that Book . Follow her on Twitter >@veenavenugopal )

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