Maj Gen Sanjeev Dogra (Retd)
sanjeev662006@gmail.com
There is a ninety-two-year-old man in Jammu who still counts his steps. Ten thousand a day, most days. He does yoga in the park, an hour and a half, regular as sunrise and has built, over the years, his own small parliament of friends who meet there each morning. He carries two notebooks. The first tracks his stock market trades in careful longhand; the ledger of a man who still has tomorrow in mind. The second holds his address, a few important phone numbers, and a folded five-hundred-rupee note, just in case of emergency. That second notebook is, in its quiet way, the more remarkable of the two. It is the notebook of a man who is prepared for life, not retreating from it.
He also worries about his plants.
On a terrace somewhere in Delhi where his heart still anchored, he has pots: lemon trees, rubber plants. When he is away, he calls to ask about them. Has the lemon tree flowered? Is anyone watering the mint? It sounds like the fussing of old age. It is, actually, something far more interesting. It is a declaration, quiet and without fanfare, that he still has things worth caring for. And therefore, still has reasons to be here. This is the secret of aging well. Not youth’s imitation. Not a medical miracle. Just purpose, dressed in the ordinary clothes of daily habit.
The Mountain That Moves
When we are children, our parents seem like mountains. Fixed, certain, unarguable. They know where the medicines are. They know how to fix the fuse. In youth, we start to see them differently, as people with opinions we occasionally disagree with, habits that can irritate, and an alarming tendency to forward long messages on family WhatsApp groups at six in the morning. We love them. But somewhere along the way, we stop really watching them.
Old age asks us to watch again. And it is a different kind of watching. A child watches a parent for security. An adult child watches a parent and sees their own future, the question of who they themselves might become. The novelist Graham Greene wrote that old age is like everything else: to make a success of it, you have to start young. He was not being flippant. He was pointing at something true. Old age is not a foreign country you suddenly arrive in. It is the destination your whole life has been building toward, one quiet day at a time.
What age strips away, it is said, is excess. What remains is the clearest expression of who a person really is. In some, bitterness hardens. In others, gentleness deepens. The question worth asking now and not later is what kind of person you are building today, who will one day be old.
The Notebook and the Lemon Tree
Hemingway’s Santiago, in The Old Man and the Sea, is an old fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a catch. By every measure, he should give up. He is old, tired, and the sea has not been kind. Yet he rows out further than the others. He fights a great fish for three days, loses it to sharks on the way home, and returns with nothing but a skeleton and an aching body. And yet, in the novel’s final image, he is asleep, dreaming of lions on the beach. Young lions. He is not dreaming of the fish he lost. He is dreaming forward.
The man in Jammu is dreaming forward too. He is not recording trades for nostalgia. He records them because tomorrow he intends to make another one. The stock market is beside the point. What matters is that he has a tomorrow in mind, that he is still, in Hemingway’s phrase, going out further.
The emergency notebook tells its own story. A lesser spirit might call it anxious preparedness. Look again. A man who tucks five hundred rupees into a notebook, just in case, is a man who fully intends to be out and about in the world. He is not preparing for the end. He is preparing for the next walk, the next conversation, the next outing. The rupees are a bet on continuity.
The lemon tree is the same bet. You water it today because you believe it will flower tomorrow. In our ancient wisdom there is a word, Sankalp. An inner resolve that keeps a human life in motion. The man tending his plants has Sankalp. It may look like gardening. It is the will to live.
What We Get Wrong
We have, as a society, grown terribly efficient at diminishing the old. We do it gently, which makes it worse. We use a higher pitch of voice. We simplify sentences. We make decisions on their behalf. We put them in front of the television to keep them occupied. We say things like, He is very good, actually, for his age, as though age were an illness and functionality a pleasant surprise.
The psychologist Erik Erikson argued that the great task of old age is what he called ego integrity: the ability to look back at one’s life and accept it, wholly and without despair. Those who achieve it find peace. Those who do not find bitterness. The difference lies not in what happened to a person, but in whether those around them treat them as someone still worth engaging with.
The elderly do not merely need care. They need conversation. They need to feel that their opinions still carry weight, that their stories are still wanted, that they are participants rather than patients. Research consistently shows that social connection is among the strongest predictors of wellbeing in older adults, stronger, in some studies, than diet or exercise. The old man’s morning parliament in the park is not idle socialising. It is medicine.
A Word to the Young
If you are in your twenties or thirties, here is something worth pausing for: the old person you find it hardest to be patient with is usually the one who most needs you to try. Not because they are needy. Because they are engaged in one of the harder and more dignified struggles available to a human being, staying useful, connected, and curious in a world that has largely decided to move without them. That takes courage. Quiet, daily, unannounced courage.
Call them. Not on Diwali and birthdays only. Call because it is a Tuesday. Visit without a reason. When you do, put the phone down and look at them. Ask about something they know that you do not , which if they have lived nine decades, is quite a lot. Ask what they were afraid of at your age. Ask what they wish they had done differently. Ask about the person they loved most and whether that person knew it. You will not regret these conversations. You will regret, with considerable precision, the ones you did not have.
In return you will receive something no amount of scrolling can provide: the long view. People who have survived eight or nine decades carry an immunity to panic. They have seen governments fall, fashions pass, and catastrophes that seemed permanent dissolve into footnotes. They know in a way the young cannot yet know but urgently need to hear that most of what feel urgent is not. And that most of what truly matters is embarrassingly simple: be kind, stay connected, keep going.
Keep Watering the Plants
What remains after a life of purpose is the instruction it leaves. Not always in words but mostly in example. In the accumulated evidence that a human being can face diminishment without surrender, can maintain dignity not by refusing to age but by refusing to become aimless. The emergency notebook, the trade ledger, the morning yoga, the question about the lemon flower, each is a small flag planted in the ground that says: I am still here, and I intend to remain.
A well-tended lemon tree does not flower once and stop. It flowers in season, rests, and flowers again. Each time, it needs someone who believes in next time.
Perhaps that is what the elderly are, at their best a recurring flowering. Quieter than the first bloom. More knowing. But still reaching for the sun, which is the only direction that matters. And perhaps what the young are called to be is the ones who keep watering.
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