On the Right Side of 60

In the magic hour of midnight — the June 30, 2025, to be precise — I morphed from a perfectly normal human into the hitherto not-so-desirable category of ‘senior citizen’. Just the previous night, I was fine, going about my work and home routine without a song and dance about my age. As days passed, the realisation slowly dawned that I was now on the wrong side of sixty — that immutable number at which you retire. I had been looking forward to my retirement, to a more blissful phase of life when I imagined you smell the roses (or was it the coffee?), feel the breeze and have not a care in the world. However, my expectations went for a spin when confronted with what was happening in real life.

Take, for example, the never-ending question, post congratulatory messages on retirement, as to ‘what next?’ I fended off most of these with a cheery, ‘No thoughts on this now; the plan is to enjoy the freedom.’ To the more pesky ones, my answer was to find me a job, following which the person at the other end would fall into silence. The ones from my parents and family were a little more difficult to handle, as I could not fob them off lightly. You see, when one is on a roller-coaster ride and in a fast-track career path, no matter how important it is to have a plan for later, this almost inevitably never happens. I thought and pondered over what I really wanted to do at this point in my life. One did not have many material wants at this stage; what really mattered was being happy, healthy, and doing the things one truly wanted to do. I sat them down and explained about the wonderfully engaging but stressful past 37 years, and finally, my need to exercise the freedom to do — or not do — anything.

There were also an exponentially large number of calls. Somehow, the news of my retirement benefits had been leaked! I was besieged and stalked by calls and visits. Magically, my ever-reliable bankers, State Bank, sent their Relationship Manager over. I was impressed by this revolutionary idea of building relationships, but this proved to be short-lived. SBI seems to rotate RMs every few months, before you can make any attempt at a meaningful ‘relationship’. There were calls from wealth managers, fund houses, and others peddling everything from investments and insurance to gold, land and so on. Even my local fruitwalla, with whom I used to have brief chats, had a thing or two to say about the stock markets. Amidst all this, the scamsters on the phone (who had hitherto been dispatched with a cheery, ‘Sorry, I do not want to be digitally arrested; bring on the handcuffs’) seemed like angels. Needless to say, after a few encounters of a decidedly tempestuous nature, I decided to simply not take calls from unsaved numbers — to save the face of some poor guys sweating it out in some dingy basement!

Then there was the prospect of getting drowned and completely obliterated by the material stuff we had somehow managed to accumulate over the years. Our home, when I returned after retirement, resembled a battlefield — littered with metaphorical mines, costly equipment that no longer worked, and beautiful objects we never needed. Every gift received on birthdays, anniversaries and retirements, every souvenir picked up across the cities and continents we travelled, every book that our children or we had read and reread over the years, came back to haunt us. The thing with material objects is that they tend to take up space and cannot be wished away. It was therefore time to roll up my sleeves and get down to some serious cleaning. This proved to be a herculean task indeed, given our Indian upbringing to squirrel away odds and ends for a rainy day!

But of late, I had been deeply influenced by the Japanese concepts of ikigai and wabi-sabi. When we live in simple, open spaces, our minds too remain clutter-free. I made a mental note not to reach out for my smartphone before 8 am and after 10 pm, unless urgent, and not to commit the eternal sin of browsing and falling into the minehole that is the internet. The rest was easier — that is, to give away, donate or sell many of the material objects. In any case, apart from their gadgets, my children are not interested in material possessions, especially clothes. Although everyone in my family loves books, we all decided to donate many of them to not-for-profit organisations that run schools and libraries, so that other children could experience the same bliss we had been fortunate enough to enjoy. The same happened with clothes, gift items, kitchen utilities, furniture, etc.

Now, I feel much lighter, armed with the resolve to look inwards, spend more time with myself, remain healthy and positive, recycle what is left, and buy only what is necessary. With a renewed spring in my step, I look forward to the right side of 60!

Views expressed are personal. The writer is a retired IRS officer who served as the Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana