“Where are all the old people?” asked my mother-in-law during an earlier trip to Dubai, as we walked around the mall that was bustling with a youthful crowd. It must have been disconcerting for her to be the only one around with a crown of grey hair and being pushed around in a wheelchair.
I was about to make what I thought was a witty remark, but one glance at my wife who was giving me a look that said, ‘Be careful’, made me swallow my words. I was about to say that there is a separate district near the beach where all the elderly are placed.
But, I quickly changed track and said something about how the Gulf states have a very young population. “Nearly 30 per cent of the population comprises teenagers,” I said proudly, pulling out figures from the top of my head like a seasoned tourist guide.
A reputed bank recently said, after they did a survey, that 51 per cent of the expatriates in the UAE are aged between 18 and 35 years.
“These don’t look like teenagers,” said my mother-in-law, waving her hands at the crowd of people with paunches, cellulite thighs and receding hairlines. “Anyway, where are the old people?” she asked again. My mother-in-law was feeling lost as none of her kind was around, because in her hometown Delhi, there would be scores of people with white hair, hobbling around on bad legs and stiff knees.
Then as I looked around, I realised that there were neither any elderly people nor any youth in the mall at that moment. “Malls are usually the hang-outs of the teens,” I told myself, wondering whether they have found new places to keep away from us — ‘the ageing population’.
My mother-in-law’s remarks came to mind, as there was an announcement recently that two-thirds of Dubai’s population is between 20 and 39 years of age. On further research, I found that in the not-so-distant future, this young population will turn old fast, as fertility rates drop due to various factors ranging from smoking to late marriages.
Meanwhile, the so-called elderly are now living longer due to huge advances in medical science and health care. A doctor said that nowadays it is as important to find out the functional age of a person, besides the biological age. There are various indicators that constitute functional age — such as a good memory, good visual, auditory and brain responses — he said.
Many of these so-called ‘baby boomers’ are also resorting to plastic surgery to keep looking youthful. Doctors say the number of men seeking surgery is increasing as they find the need to keep working in these hard times.
I was reading Arianna Huffington’s blog the other day. She is the president and editor of the Huffington Media group. She talks about how people in their 60s and even 70s are going through the ‘second act’ of their lives. She noted that more and more people would continue to work well into their ‘golden’ years.
“For many, 70 really is the new 50,” she said. “Increasingly, people are rejecting the idea of retirement as a withdrawal. They want their later years to have as much meaning and purpose as their primary working years — or, in the case of many, more purpose and more meaning,” she said.
A friend in another Gulf country had remarked how a sexagenarian in his office, who had been given the final farewell at his workplace, had gone home and come back with a new passport that showed him to be in his early 50s.
“He doesn’t look much different, but he now jogs in the park every evening. It’s remarkable what a new passport can do for you,” my friend said.
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai.
