They were found in gutters, on streets, in bushes. They were boarded on trains, deserted in hospitals, dumped at temples. They were sent away for being sick or outliving paychecks or simply growing too old.
By the time they reached this home for the aged and unwanted, many were too numb to speak. Some took months to mouth the truth of how they came to spend their final days in exile.
“They said, ‘Taking care of him is not our cup of tea,’” says Amirchand Sharma, 65, a retired policeman whose sons left him to die near the river after he was badly hurt in an accident. “They said, ‘Throw him away.’”
In its traditions, in its religious tenets and in its laws, India has long cemented the belief that it is a child’s duty to care for his aging parents. But in a land known for revering its elderly, a secret shame has emerged: A burgeoning population of older people abandoned by their own families.
This is a country where grandparents routinely share a roof with children and grandchildren, and where the expectation that the young care for the old is so ingrained in the national ethos that nursing homes are a relative rarity and hiring caregivers is often seen as taboo. But expanding lifespans have brought ballooning caregiving pressure, a wave of urbanization has driven many young far from their home villages and a creeping Western influence has begun eroding the tradition of multigenerational living.
Courtrooms swell with thousands of cases of parents seeking help from their children. Footpaths and alleys are crowded with older people who now call them home. And a cottage industry of nonprofits for the abandoned has sprouted, operating a constantly growing number of shelters that continually fill.
In the west we emphasize the unnatural independence of our babies (e.g. cry it out) leading to adults who have unnatural detachments to their parents, leaving them in homes. That’s only part of it though. Also children who are growing up to realize that they are not obliged to keeping their abusive parents in their lives.
Now that’s too far in the opposite direction. Cultures are kind of random; presumably lots of other cultures have attitudes towards infant care that are similar, or even less “attentive”. I forget which Native culture around here had the trick where you mess with your baby’s nose so they stop crying altogether.
I suspect it’s less child psychology and more recent history. Traditionally, extended families often lived together in the West too. It just went away during the 20th century due to a confluence of ideological emphasis on the nuclear family and enough money sloshing around the common classes for people to actually implement that.
If what you’re saying is that it stems from capitalism, then yes. I agree that’s the root cause and the rest are symptoms.