Retirement: hell to a lot, paradise to a few
Sunday, 15 November 2009
Maswood Alam Khan
Hundreds of thousands of elderly public servants in Bangladesh who are on the verge of retirement are feeling their every nerve on the edge, some with expectations that they would remain unretired and the others with fears that they would be sidelined. Such anxieties fueled by tantalizing news reports are wrecking neurological havoc not only on the aged public servants but also on the dependent members of their families. Diametric forces of expectations and fears are tearing even those public servants apart who already did bid adieu to their office colleagues and are now on 'leave preparatory to retirement'.
The public servants on whom a heavy punch would be landed are those who will have to narrowly 'miss the bus' if the extended retirement age is effected after they would have left office.
Now that there is a rumor that the effect of extended retirement age may be from January 01, 2010, those whose last days of work were at the fag end of 2009 would be cursing their fate. Such narrow missing is heartbreaking to those public servants who deem remaining in a job remaining in a haven.
Elderly public servants who are now preparing themselves to go for retirement would perhaps have been relieved from such traumatic feeling of 'narrow missing' if the government, in consonance with financial year, could quite logically give the effect of extension from July 01, 2010 or even better if from a far flung date like July 01, 2012. Such late effect could also give the government cushions to employ the unemployed young in greater numbers to fill out the positions to be vacated by retirees.
Neither would it be wise, many believe, on the part of the government to pull those public servants, who are already on 'leave preparatory to retirement', in a reverse direction by placing them again in the service they had left. Any such newly introduced retrospective effect in retirement rule may severely jeopardize time-honored service disciplines in respect of seniority and in many other ways and may encourage public servants to raise many such weird demands in future. Such retrospective effecting in retirement rule may create a dodgy belief among people that 'a dead horse can be flogged back to its life'.
A majority of honest public servants, unless they have some family liabilities like their young children still studying in school, college or university, does not favor the idea of extending retirement age. Rather many efficient public servants favor lowering the retirement age limit so that they, when they are still healthy, could do a new job after retirement.
Those who fear they are not at all productive and there is no prospect for them to find a job elsewhere and especially those who are used to misusing power of public offices and to getting their palms greased by the public are usually desperate for extension of retirement age. Some of them would not even mind if they were allowed only to occupy chairs of power with absolutely no pay and perks. To them, the monthly pay and perks, however fat, are not enough to meet their pocket expenses for a single day. They obviously cannot find the real beauty of life in retirement. Retired life, to them, is a hellish life.
In spite of all the advancements in science and technology and relentless efforts by astrologers and palmists, humans have not yet invented a scientific clue or honed an astrological talent to foretell when an earthquake is going to hit or the exact moment when a man or a woman is going to breathe his or her last. The only phenomena that can precisely be foretold about a man's fate are perhaps the moment when dreadfully a man is going to die if he is sentenced by a court of law to be hanged to death and the day when poignantly a public servant is going to retire from his work.
People find a queer analogy between the date when a man is to be hanged to death and the date when an employee is to be retired. In both cases a man waits for the countdown to the day and prepares himself to accept the reality that is certainly going to happen. The experience of waiting for the day to be hanged cannot be felt by any human being except by the victim himself. But the man who knows the date of his retirement can at least feel how it is like to number the days remaining before he is bound by law to stop working.
Once retired from active work life, a man or a woman is deemed an old person by our society where old age is interpreted as a liability and youth an asset. After decades of achievement, an old man finds his knowledge and talent suddenly reckoned worthless.
There was a time when old people constituted a repository of knowledge and experiences when there was no website to contain the latest and the most reliable information. Younger people would approach the elders to learn how to solve day-to-day crises. But now it is the elderly people who rather approach the computer savvy younger people to learn how to solve a puzzle or to face an ordeal.
Actually, the problem with us who are queasy about uncertainty in retired life is our insatiable cravings to get what we don't deserve and to afford what we can't maintain. We hate to act our age. The trouble is we can't accept the reality of our declining power with our age advancing. Instead of priding ourselves on our salt-and-pepper hairs as a signature of maturity we paper over our frailties by dying our hairs jet-black.
A retired life would have been exciting if we could take retirement as a gift from God. Those, however, who practice humility and feel content with whatever they are blessed with, have a blissful ability to derive pleasures from amid pains of retirement life. Every cloud, we know, has a silver lining as every pain holds in store a pleasant surprise.
In English language 'to retire' also means 'to go to bed'. After working long hours when we come home late at night our eyes are already half-closed from weariness and we can't wait to retire to enjoy a goodnight sleep. Had we not labored all day long at our workplaces, we would not have enjoyed sleeping like a log all night long. If our working career is considered as a long sunny day abuzz with excitements, our retirement should conjure up a long moonlit night, redolent of floral fragrance, to enjoy sleeps and dreams.
Though, that's easier said than done!
My mother used to say: "When a mango ripens, it begs gravity for a chance to be fallen on the ground. Like a ripen mango, I now beg the Almighty to take me to HIM away from this earth as no more can I bear the burden and pain of my old age."
Retirement and death are in fact bliss in life, not agonizing burdens, provided we know how we look at life and death and how we plan our retirement well in advance. Knowing that our career and living has an endpoint helps us appreciate the spectrum of joys at different phases of life. If we were engaged to work only and if we were allowed to age only and if there were no retirement and no death we would have been bored of life at one stage and employed one servant to sack us and another to kill us.
Being retired doesn't mean your life is over. Retirement rather is a beginning of a life when we can choose what we wanted to do. While we work all our life to earn a living, be well placed in life, and secure our future, post retirement phase of our life provides us with a respite when we can relive our life in the way we always wanted to live but somehow missed living it that way owing to our responsibilities and job pressures.
A retired person's physical strength wanes when his or her sagacity and insight grows. An old person's output diminishes in quantity but increases in quality. The spiritual maturity of the aged more than compensates for their lessened physical strength.
We can easily design a fantastic retirement life free from financial stress, if only we developed a habit to set aside small savings every month to build our 'nest egg' to repose on in our retired life. We must not salt away tons of money to construct a gargantuan nest egg that, in order to be guarded, should buy us headache.
We all know we have to save, but how much? How should we spend our savings and time in our retired life? Spend the rest of life in the ancestor's home at village, vacation abroad, dote on grandchildren, unwind with good novels, magazines and music, and devote to religion or charity?
The quality of life you want in the future depends on what you contribute in the present. It is important to evaluate your present financial situation and forecast your retirement picture. While estimating future budgets a retiree must factor into his or her financial plan the cost of future inflations and additional expenses on account of progressive increase in medical costs. A retiree should remember he might live many more years than his ancestors, thanks to huge advancements in medical science.
Nevertheless, the word retirement starts in our mind with a spiral of fantasies: serene days in the village home, performing hajj in Mecca, traveling to North America, buying a brand new car, finishing the half-constructed house, rearing a milking cow, petting a pedigree dog, nursing a garden at the backyard, re-reading the books once read ages back, rediscovering neglected hobbies, taking much needed 'me time' and so on and so forth.
As a man finally enters his twilight years, he should settle down with something creative. If he is too weak to do anything creative that demands too much of physical or intellectual labor, he should find some harmless hobby with which to fill his time.
Indeed, time is then something to be "filled" and gotten over with as the retiree has to while away his days on life's sidelines, his knowledge and abilities filed away in the attic of old age. He has now revolved a full circle back to his childhood: once again he is a passive recipient in a world shaped and run by the initiative of others.
Life, I often muse, is like a train journey. December 10, 2009 is going to be the last working day in 32 years of my banking career. It seems I had started my train journey only the other day. Time seems to have passed by so quickly since my train's departure from Kamalapur Railway Station in Dhaka on its way to Chittagong Railway Station. As I now peer out the window of the cabin of my train, I can see my train has already been snaking inside the city of Chittagong! It's now a matter of only a few minutes before I will have to disembark from so familiar an environment.
All of a sudden I have started realizing I am already in the twilight years, more metaphorically in the autumn of my life. I know the spring of my life has already left me. I know the lovely autumn of my life will also one day disappear, making space for the chilly winter to visit me. I know I have to make the winter of my life pleasant too by accepting the wonder of long life, if I am granted one, as a special gift from Allah!
The writer is a banker. He can be reached at
maswood@hotmail.com
Hundreds of thousands of elderly public servants in Bangladesh who are on the verge of retirement are feeling their every nerve on the edge, some with expectations that they would remain unretired and the others with fears that they would be sidelined. Such anxieties fueled by tantalizing news reports are wrecking neurological havoc not only on the aged public servants but also on the dependent members of their families. Diametric forces of expectations and fears are tearing even those public servants apart who already did bid adieu to their office colleagues and are now on 'leave preparatory to retirement'.
The public servants on whom a heavy punch would be landed are those who will have to narrowly 'miss the bus' if the extended retirement age is effected after they would have left office.
Now that there is a rumor that the effect of extended retirement age may be from January 01, 2010, those whose last days of work were at the fag end of 2009 would be cursing their fate. Such narrow missing is heartbreaking to those public servants who deem remaining in a job remaining in a haven.
Elderly public servants who are now preparing themselves to go for retirement would perhaps have been relieved from such traumatic feeling of 'narrow missing' if the government, in consonance with financial year, could quite logically give the effect of extension from July 01, 2010 or even better if from a far flung date like July 01, 2012. Such late effect could also give the government cushions to employ the unemployed young in greater numbers to fill out the positions to be vacated by retirees.
Neither would it be wise, many believe, on the part of the government to pull those public servants, who are already on 'leave preparatory to retirement', in a reverse direction by placing them again in the service they had left. Any such newly introduced retrospective effect in retirement rule may severely jeopardize time-honored service disciplines in respect of seniority and in many other ways and may encourage public servants to raise many such weird demands in future. Such retrospective effecting in retirement rule may create a dodgy belief among people that 'a dead horse can be flogged back to its life'.
A majority of honest public servants, unless they have some family liabilities like their young children still studying in school, college or university, does not favor the idea of extending retirement age. Rather many efficient public servants favor lowering the retirement age limit so that they, when they are still healthy, could do a new job after retirement.
Those who fear they are not at all productive and there is no prospect for them to find a job elsewhere and especially those who are used to misusing power of public offices and to getting their palms greased by the public are usually desperate for extension of retirement age. Some of them would not even mind if they were allowed only to occupy chairs of power with absolutely no pay and perks. To them, the monthly pay and perks, however fat, are not enough to meet their pocket expenses for a single day. They obviously cannot find the real beauty of life in retirement. Retired life, to them, is a hellish life.
In spite of all the advancements in science and technology and relentless efforts by astrologers and palmists, humans have not yet invented a scientific clue or honed an astrological talent to foretell when an earthquake is going to hit or the exact moment when a man or a woman is going to breathe his or her last. The only phenomena that can precisely be foretold about a man's fate are perhaps the moment when dreadfully a man is going to die if he is sentenced by a court of law to be hanged to death and the day when poignantly a public servant is going to retire from his work.
People find a queer analogy between the date when a man is to be hanged to death and the date when an employee is to be retired. In both cases a man waits for the countdown to the day and prepares himself to accept the reality that is certainly going to happen. The experience of waiting for the day to be hanged cannot be felt by any human being except by the victim himself. But the man who knows the date of his retirement can at least feel how it is like to number the days remaining before he is bound by law to stop working.
Once retired from active work life, a man or a woman is deemed an old person by our society where old age is interpreted as a liability and youth an asset. After decades of achievement, an old man finds his knowledge and talent suddenly reckoned worthless.
There was a time when old people constituted a repository of knowledge and experiences when there was no website to contain the latest and the most reliable information. Younger people would approach the elders to learn how to solve day-to-day crises. But now it is the elderly people who rather approach the computer savvy younger people to learn how to solve a puzzle or to face an ordeal.
Actually, the problem with us who are queasy about uncertainty in retired life is our insatiable cravings to get what we don't deserve and to afford what we can't maintain. We hate to act our age. The trouble is we can't accept the reality of our declining power with our age advancing. Instead of priding ourselves on our salt-and-pepper hairs as a signature of maturity we paper over our frailties by dying our hairs jet-black.
A retired life would have been exciting if we could take retirement as a gift from God. Those, however, who practice humility and feel content with whatever they are blessed with, have a blissful ability to derive pleasures from amid pains of retirement life. Every cloud, we know, has a silver lining as every pain holds in store a pleasant surprise.
In English language 'to retire' also means 'to go to bed'. After working long hours when we come home late at night our eyes are already half-closed from weariness and we can't wait to retire to enjoy a goodnight sleep. Had we not labored all day long at our workplaces, we would not have enjoyed sleeping like a log all night long. If our working career is considered as a long sunny day abuzz with excitements, our retirement should conjure up a long moonlit night, redolent of floral fragrance, to enjoy sleeps and dreams.
Though, that's easier said than done!
My mother used to say: "When a mango ripens, it begs gravity for a chance to be fallen on the ground. Like a ripen mango, I now beg the Almighty to take me to HIM away from this earth as no more can I bear the burden and pain of my old age."
Retirement and death are in fact bliss in life, not agonizing burdens, provided we know how we look at life and death and how we plan our retirement well in advance. Knowing that our career and living has an endpoint helps us appreciate the spectrum of joys at different phases of life. If we were engaged to work only and if we were allowed to age only and if there were no retirement and no death we would have been bored of life at one stage and employed one servant to sack us and another to kill us.
Being retired doesn't mean your life is over. Retirement rather is a beginning of a life when we can choose what we wanted to do. While we work all our life to earn a living, be well placed in life, and secure our future, post retirement phase of our life provides us with a respite when we can relive our life in the way we always wanted to live but somehow missed living it that way owing to our responsibilities and job pressures.
A retired person's physical strength wanes when his or her sagacity and insight grows. An old person's output diminishes in quantity but increases in quality. The spiritual maturity of the aged more than compensates for their lessened physical strength.
We can easily design a fantastic retirement life free from financial stress, if only we developed a habit to set aside small savings every month to build our 'nest egg' to repose on in our retired life. We must not salt away tons of money to construct a gargantuan nest egg that, in order to be guarded, should buy us headache.
We all know we have to save, but how much? How should we spend our savings and time in our retired life? Spend the rest of life in the ancestor's home at village, vacation abroad, dote on grandchildren, unwind with good novels, magazines and music, and devote to religion or charity?
The quality of life you want in the future depends on what you contribute in the present. It is important to evaluate your present financial situation and forecast your retirement picture. While estimating future budgets a retiree must factor into his or her financial plan the cost of future inflations and additional expenses on account of progressive increase in medical costs. A retiree should remember he might live many more years than his ancestors, thanks to huge advancements in medical science.
Nevertheless, the word retirement starts in our mind with a spiral of fantasies: serene days in the village home, performing hajj in Mecca, traveling to North America, buying a brand new car, finishing the half-constructed house, rearing a milking cow, petting a pedigree dog, nursing a garden at the backyard, re-reading the books once read ages back, rediscovering neglected hobbies, taking much needed 'me time' and so on and so forth.
As a man finally enters his twilight years, he should settle down with something creative. If he is too weak to do anything creative that demands too much of physical or intellectual labor, he should find some harmless hobby with which to fill his time.
Indeed, time is then something to be "filled" and gotten over with as the retiree has to while away his days on life's sidelines, his knowledge and abilities filed away in the attic of old age. He has now revolved a full circle back to his childhood: once again he is a passive recipient in a world shaped and run by the initiative of others.
Life, I often muse, is like a train journey. December 10, 2009 is going to be the last working day in 32 years of my banking career. It seems I had started my train journey only the other day. Time seems to have passed by so quickly since my train's departure from Kamalapur Railway Station in Dhaka on its way to Chittagong Railway Station. As I now peer out the window of the cabin of my train, I can see my train has already been snaking inside the city of Chittagong! It's now a matter of only a few minutes before I will have to disembark from so familiar an environment.
All of a sudden I have started realizing I am already in the twilight years, more metaphorically in the autumn of my life. I know the spring of my life has already left me. I know the lovely autumn of my life will also one day disappear, making space for the chilly winter to visit me. I know I have to make the winter of my life pleasant too by accepting the wonder of long life, if I am granted one, as a special gift from Allah!
The writer is a banker. He can be reached at
maswood@hotmail.com