We have a serious Retirement Problem. Yes it is the Retirement Bomb that we are refusing to acknowledge.

In China with its restricted press the children killing parents stories are not coming out. As a country we have a major crisis in our hands. Many of our senior citizens do not have enough money, and so live with their children. Children do not have enough money to pay for their parents to live in senior citizen homes. So they live together.

Now let us say that a 85 year old man has a 81 year old wife. Somebody needs to take care of them. So it is the unmarried son or daughter who has to do this. Full time. 365 days in a year. It could even be a widowed  daughter on whom the task falls. I don’t have a heart to call it ‘burden’ but it is not wrong to call it a burden too. Look at the 72 year lady who was widowed 10 years ago and looking after a 90 year old widowed mother with dementia. I can assure you life is no picnic. Her own brother is younger, staying 400 km away, hard of hearing and refusing to look after his mother even for a week in a year! What does she do?

I was watching television in a hotel room when I saw this 50+ woman killing her mom episode on a Crime channel. I have no clue whether it is a crime. Will this 50 year old woman kill her neighbor? I guess we have no clue of how stress can get a person to become a criminal – exactly for 5 minutes, and then spend their time in repentance. We do not even have financial solutions.

Now let us take the case of a person running a senior citizen home. If a 55 year old man comes with his parents and pays Rs. 10L as a deposit, and promises to pay Rs. 1L every month for their upkeep. The senior citizen home management accepts it. Say about 5 months later the son vanishes and cannot be traced. Stops paying.

What is the senior citizen home management supposed to do?

We need a lot of answers for a lot of these questions. Putting that 50+ woman in jail is the easiest thing to do. How do we stop the next son/daughter killing a parent? Or a tired mother killing her mentally/ physically challenged kid/ sibling?

I don’t have answers…but we have to search together.