Insults Of Aging

Her brown, wrinkled skin looked faded and timeworn. Her eyes were blood flecked and cloudy as though she had seen too much suffering. Her back was stooped over as if she carried invisible weights upon them. Her hair was smoky grey, and her smile was angelic. The lips that were once beautiful were now dry and cracked. Yes, I am talking about my grandmother. One fine evening I sat with my grandmother and she said: “Our times were different dear”. And I asked what made her say that. To this, she said, “We are surrounded by ideals of beauty and whenever I look into the mirror it's hard. But then, I think about you and your friends, they are all amazing. They are driven by their own passions. There is a lot of confidence in young women these days.

Our society is very shallow, but one day women will evolve into their self-worth.” To understand people we need to understand their times, talk to them and feel what they had felt. There is a wide generation gap between me and my grandmother so our opinions never match but when I think about this I realize that maybe in their times' things were looked at from a different perspective. These days we observe that children are not willing to take care of their parents and what they don’t realize is that it is our moral duty to take care of our parents. We forget that the foundation of our lives are built by our parents.

This is all happening because of fast life, industrialization and money oriented minds. Human beings have now become machines which starts in the early morning hours and ends late at night. And during this time, we forget some moral duties that we are expected to perform. Old people expect financial, physical and emotional support from their children. We are so much involved in making our careers that we don’t pay heed to the needs of our parents. This makes them feel like an unwanted member of the family. When these things happen, the old people sink into oceans of depression. Our parents showed us the world, so let's give them happiness in return rather than showing them the old age home.