Recently, I discovered there was something entirely different happening in the UK.
The UK government has apparently appointed a Minister for Loneliness, who will help those people in the society who are lonely and feel isolated.
According to the statistics, there are about 2,00,000 senior citizen in Britain who are lonely and have not had any meaningful conversation with a family member or a friend in more than a month. And almost more than fifty percent of those who are above the age of 75 live on their own, without a family member or friend present to care for them.
If you talk about India, the numbers are not that different, with almost 50 percent senior citizens suffering from loneliness – in a country of 1.3 billion!?
This to me was really disturbing news.
Imagine a scenario where the government has to appoint people who can come forward and help you reduce some of the loneliness. Where you are assigned people who will come to your home and spend time with you, mainly because they are being paid to do so.
I understand that at the moment this is a win-win situation there.
Those who are living alone get someone who can spend time with them, while the carers or the appointed friends get the money, and some even feel they learn a lot from a generation that has seen much more than they already have.
Reading about this made me wonder – are we also headed the same way?
Image Credit: Twitter
This thought also cropped up when I read the news story about an NRI returning to India, only to find his mom’s bones in the house! The lady, who was living here alone, had not had any form of communication with her son in 4 months, which was common in their relationship.
For years, Indians have looked up to the Western and European world as being more modern and more out there, while we considered our joint families and our thick family bonds more as an impediment.
But what if it’s a way of keeping intact our sanity?
What if this bond, which we may or may not truly like all the time, still forces us to be in touch with our families and even with our extended families, so that we have them in our lives in some way? Maybe it will help us, once we exhaust all our social media friends and our virtual acquaintances are done with, to actually have a real, loving and caring human being, who knows us for what we are, and accepts us with all our flaws and beauties.
I think that no matter how much we curse our family Whatsapp groups, it’s still a good way to stay connected. Mute it, but know who is doing what, and give out an occasional hello. Or maybe just pick up the phone and surprise your parents without any agenda, or better still, go and meet them on a surprise visit? It’s not always that we need a reason to go and meet our family, sometimes, the only reason that needs to be there is that they are ours, and that’s all.
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