The stubborn old spirit

AGNES is a wearable suit designed to simulate old age by altering the functioning of the arms, legs, hands, neck, spine, eyes, ears and other crucial body parts

This week, a 72-year-old man crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a small, self-designed, barrel-shaped plywood vessel. For four months, he steered the bright orange barrel with the help of the wind and ocean currents, often braving bad weather on the way and twice narrowly missing collisions with ships. When someone asked him why he did it, he replied: “Maybe to prove that I’ve still got it.”

This tenacious adventurer got me thinking about people who do what they do even when age tries to hold them back. I have often found myself stumped by their resolve. And it isn’t always about that indefatigable spirit that has them sailing across oceans. Or scaling mountains. Or running marathons, like the 108-year-old Fauja Singh. Or doing pushups and planks, like Milind Soman’s 80-year-old mother, Usha Soman. Or demonstrating frog jumps at 90, the way my grandfather did in our living room (with us watching half alarmed, half awe-struck by this impromptu lesson in fitness). Sometimes it’s about something as unremarkable as them walking to the polling booth, standing in the queue, waiting their turn even when their legs can barely hold them up.

Every election season, some newspaper or the other publishes a picture of an elderly person being wheeled or carried to the polling station. This time round the one that caught my eye was of 111-year-old Bachan Singh, Delhi’s oldest voter. I took in his reed-thin frame dressed in white, seated in a wheelchair. His sunken eyes looked at the camera as three people held him steady and a fourth pushed the wheelchair.

I suppose the picture arrested my attention because it reminded me of another old man, though not as old as Bachan Singh, who had stood in the queue at my polling booth a little ahead of me. Coming to cast his vote had evidently been an effort for him, as it had for Bachan Singh.

Bachan Singh, 111, Delhi’s oldest voter. Photo: PTI

To escape the queue and the Delhi heat, we had reached our polling station at 6.45 am, 15 minutes before it was to open. The polling centre opened on the dot but voting didn’t begin immediately. There was some problem with the EVMs and the polling officials, having rectified it, were making sure that they worked properly. So we waited. Unable to stand, the man in front of me walked to a chair near the policeman on duty and sat down. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He was tired, perhaps even unwell, yet had come to vote. Only 60 per cent of Delhi voted this time — five per cent less than in 2014. He and Bachan Singh and several other elderly citizens like them were among those who did. Watching him I was able to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, the stories that those typical “human interest pictures”, like Bachan Singh’s, tell. Stories of human perseverance.

It is sometimes difficult to empathise with the effort that age demands of a person. To help people understand what it feels like to be in their mid-70s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab developed AGNES — Age Gain Now Empathy System. AGNES is a wearable suit designed to simulate old age (mid-70s and above) by altering the functioning of the arms, legs, hands, neck, spine, eyes, ears and other crucial body parts. Using bands, straps, helmets, restrictive gloves and yellow glasses, the suit gives the person a taste of old age — a time when joint mobility reduces, the gait becomes shorter and heavier, the neck stiffer, making turning the head difficult, and when the natural yellowing of the eyes compromises vision. The suit also includes customised shoes that simulate the weakening of the musculoskeletal system, and the uncertainty and imbalance that comes with it.

I am not sure I want to try this suit on. I would rather get there when I will. And when — if — I do, I hope I have some of that extraordinary spirit to carry me through. And if that spirit allows me a couple of frog jumps, like my grandfather who was a wee bit short of 102 when he signed out, that’ll be the cherry on the cake.

veenu.sandhu@bsmail.in