Octogenarian Adithya Varma furrows his brow, racking his brain for the next best move. His “opponent” for the day, 62-year-old Dineshan M R, has just made a clever gambit with his white piece on the chessboard. The two slug it out in a “friendly contest” against the background score of rain at Alive’s recreational room in Pandit’s Colony at Kowdiar. At Alive’s ongoing Golden Fest: A Celebration for Seniors, the participants are out there to prove that age is indeed just a number with a whole lot of fun-filled activities. For them, ‘retirement’ does not necessarily mean retirement from enjoyment. It’s also been an occasion to rub shoulders with “like-minded peers.”
“I love chess. I often play it online. But, this time, I’m happy to ‘face off’ with a human,” says Dineshan, a former BSNL employee. For Adithya, a former State-level player, the game has “kept me going” for decades.
Open for those above 60, the fête, organised by the ageing solutions company as part of a three-day festival, which kicked off on Thursday, includes badminton, carrom, sudoku, crossword, story-writing, painting contest and so on, perhaps the highlight being the ‘Golden Couple’ contest on Saturday. While some consider it as an opportunity to socialise with people their age, others like G Sundaresan, who participates in carrom and singing, feels “it’s like time-warping back to college days.” “I recently underwent a surgery for cataract and have been confined in my home for a while. I used to play a lot of carrom in college and it feels nice to play a game,” says the 63-year-old, a former banker. The oldest participant is 92-year-old Rama Varma, is trying his luck in the music and story-writing contests.
Lalitha Bai, a retired secretariat employee, loves to paint, one reason why she is eagerly looking for the painting contest on Saturday. The 62-year-old says she often experiments with different media and styles such as murals and landscape and “one-stroke greeting cards.” For Rajani Chandran, a former professor with College of Agriculture, Vellayani, writing is a passion. She has brought out a few books for the State Resource Centre, while some of her stories have appeared in vernacular magazines. Come Saturday, she will be picking up the pen again for the story-writing contest in Malayalam.
It’s not just about artistic expressions and creativity, there’s room to work some of the gray matter too, something 69-year-old Vijaya Prem is looking forward to with the Sudoku competition. “In my family, there have been incidents of dementia and I have been told that playing Sudoku is good for the brain. I have been solving them for the past 10 years. Also, at this age, you have to find your own entertainment, right?,” asks the Mumbai native who’s settled in the city.
For 72-year-old crossword enthusiast K T Rajagopalan, who retired as general manager of a bank, his tryst with word puzzles goes back well over 45 years. “Any new crossword is a new challenge for me. My age does not matter,” he says with a laugh.
BRB Puthran, co-founder and CEO of Alive: Adding Life to Years, says the idea is to promote “active ageing” and that the Golden Fest attempts to highlight the importance of both mobility and cognitive engagement in old age, done with dash of fun. “The focus is on two-way engagement and that’s the kind of activities we have incorporated as part of the festival,” he points out.
The festival is held at the Alive centre, Sree Moolam Club and Hassan Marikar Hall.
