October 1, 2026

We raised them on our sweat and blood. When their wings grew strong, they forgot the branch that held them.

International Day of Older Persons - 1 October

There is a tree. Any tree. The kind that stands at the edge of a village, or in the corner of a crowded lane, its bark scarred by monsoons no one remembers.

In its arms, a bird builds a nest. Twig by twig, thread by stolen thread, one small patient labour at a time. She lays her eggs and sits on them through the heat and the rain, hungry, not moving, believing in something she cannot yet see.

Then the chicks come. Pink, blind, all mouth. And the parents begin the long arithmetic of survival: out at dawn, back at dusk, across fields and wires and the mouths of cats, a worm here, a grain there, dropped into open beaks. They fly farther each day. They eat less each day. They grow thinner so that something else can grow strong.

And one fine morning, the feathers are ready. The wings, once damp and trembling, catch the wind. The young one stands at the edge of the nest, looks at the whole wide sky, and leaves.

It does not look back. Not because it is cruel. Because the sky is so large, and the nest is so small. And a nest, after all, is only the place you were made ready to leave.

The tree stays. The nest stays. The old birds stay, listening for wingbeats that do not come.

Now replace the tree with a tiny rented house. Replace the twigs with overtime shifts. Replace the worms and grains with school fees, coaching fees, laptop instalments, and one more loan against one more piece of gold.

This is the story of a generation.

A father who wore the same chappals until the straps wore through so his son could have branded shoes for the interview. A mother who ate last, ate least, and called it 'I'm not hungry.' Bangles pawned quietly. A plot of ancestral land sold without a word. Sweat and blood, not as a metaphor, but as a monthly budget. All of it poured into a single hope: study well, and life will be better than ours.

And it worked. Gen Z and the generations before it are the most educated in India's history. They have degrees, certifications, offer letters, visas. They are building careers in Toronto and Dublin and Frankfurt and San Jose. They post about their new apartments, their first snowfall, their promotions.

Meanwhile, back in the nest, the phone is charged and kept close. Just in case.

Ambition is not a crime. No one wants to clip a wing. But somewhere between the entrance exam and the boarding pass, a lesson went missing: that the branch that held you up is still a branch, and it grows old, and it needs holding too.

The man who drives through the silence

In Bengaluru, a city that has renamed itself many times and forgotten each name faster than the last, an old man steers an auto-rickshaw through the traffic. He is ninety-one. His hands, spotted and steady, have held the same steering wheel since 1960, when the city was still a pensioners' paradise of lakes, gardens, and slow afternoons. Sixty-six years. Governments have fallen and risen. Flyovers have swallowed old banyan trees. And he has kept driving, like a small brown boat in a river that has forgotten its source.

His children have flown. They are educated, of course. He saw to that. They live across oceans, in a time zone where his morning is their midnight.

When a journalist, Sheela C. Shetty, asked him why, at ninety-one, he was still out here in the smoke and the horns, he did not say poverty. He did not say abandonment. He said something far more dangerous. He said that in his whole life he had never begged ten rupees from anyone. And his children, he said, do not ask what he needs. So as long as there is strength in his body, he will earn his own bread.

Read that again, slowly. They do not ask what he needs.

It is not cruelty, exactly. Cruelty would at least be an event, something with a date, a witness, a villain. This is something quieter. This is a phone that rings on festivals. This is love reduced to a monthly transfer, or worse, to a video call in which the connection is always poor and everyone is always about to hang up. This is a mother's recipe unwritten because nobody asked. This is a father's story that ends, unfinished, in an empty room.

We forgot to teach the second lesson. Sanskara is a word we now say only at weddings. Somewhere between the classroom and the departure gate, it got left behind with the pickle jars and the old photographs.

The arithmetic of empty nests

He is not an exception. He is a single, visible drop in a rising tide.

• According to the UNFPA's India Ageing Report 2023, India's elderly population (60+) was about 10.5% in 2022 and is projected to nearly double to around 20.8% by 2050, crossing 340 million people.
• More than 13 lakh Indian students were studying abroad in 2024, according to the Ministry of External Affairs, a number that has nearly doubled in just two years. Many of them will not return.
• The Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI) found that a substantial share of elders live apart from their children or alone, particularly in southern states like Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, where migration of the young is highest.
• HelpAge India's surveys on elder abuse have repeatedly found that roughly one in four elders report some form of mistreatment, most often from their own sons and daughters-in-law, and that many suffer in silence.
• Old age homes, once an alien idea, are multiplying in every metro and mid-sized town. Waiting lists grow. Some are gentle places; some are merely warehouses with a garden.

We have a law, too: the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007, which obliges children to care for their parents. But what kind of nation must legislate love? And what kind of old man will drag his own child before a tribunal?

He won't. That's the point. He will drive.

Come back to the branch

Today, 1 October, the world marks the International Day of Older Persons. Expect speeches, hashtags, a garlanded photograph or two. But the old man in the auto does not need a day. He needs a Tuesday. A random, ordinary Tuesday when a phone rings and a voice asks, Appa, did you eat?

To every young person reading this from a faraway window: the sky is yours, and you have earned it. But somewhere, a nest is being kept warm for a wingbeat. Every twig in it was your school fee. Every feather on you was someone's hunger.

Fly. Nobody is asking you to stay. Only, once in a while, remember the way home.

Somewhere in Bengaluru tonight, an old man will park his auto, count his coins, and eat a meal he paid for himself. He will be proud. He will be alone. And both of these things will be true, and neither will make the news.

Call home. Today.