Post by Ajay Sharma, Co-Founder, Epic Content & Rover Camps
We have made peace with daycare for our kids. Modern, guilt free. Say senior living for our own parents in a North Indian home though, and it suddenly sounds like betrayal.
Is that Bollywood, decades of films making joint family the only acceptable ending, or a genuine debt to people who gave us everything. Probably both.
That debt gets its shape from somewhere. Shravan Kumar remains the gold standard, carrying his blind parents across a pilgrimage on his own shoulders. Nobody argues with that as devotion. But the story belongs to an age with no vehicle, no wheelchair, no flight. Today the same devotion is expected to look identical, driving parents around personally, as if a trained driver or a wheelchair assisted flight is somehow the lesser gesture. We kept the standard, dropped the context it was written in.
Yet ask people my age what they want for their own old age, and a different answer comes up. Not solitude with children nearby, but something closer to a village of friends, sharing meals, walks, time with people their own age. We want that for ourselves. We rarely offer it to our parents.
This isnt only sentiment. A 2024 review of 86 studies found living alone raises risk of death by 21%, loneliness by 14%, social isolation by 35%, in older adults. Isolation shortens life, inside a joint family or outside one.
Vedanta had a version of this ready centuries earlier, vanaprastha, moving into the company of people at a similar stage of life once household duties are done. Mythology shows the cost of ignoring it too, had Dhritarashtra stepped back at the right time instead of holding the throne for his sons, Mahabharata might have ended very differently.
Then there is the body. Protecting elders often means stripping out physical activity entirely, which speeds up sarcopenia, age related muscle loss linked to nearly double the risk of death. Comfort without movement isn't quite care either.
The law measures care differently. India's Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act holds children responsible for parents food, shelter and medical care, comfort as an outcome, not cohabitation.
Tribunals can order maintenance, and a pending 2019 amendment would widen neglect to cover financial and emotional neglect too. The state checks if parents are fed, safe and secure, not if they share a roof with their children.
And underneath everything, money. India's pension system was ranked lowest among 52 countries in the 2025 Mercer CFA Global Pension Index. Less than a quarter of the workforce holds any formal pension. Most reach old age with no savings of their own, and so no real choice in how they get to live.
So what decides this, a myth written for a world without transport, a law measuring outcomes instead of addresses, biology we ignore, or an economy that never planned for old age. Probably all of it, pulling in different directions. Maybe that's the honest place to leave it.
