Superannuate Now!

The Government has raised the age of superannuation (retiring in simple English) of teaching staff in medical and other colleges to 62. We teachers in the civic hospitals are still stuck at 58. There is a proposal to follow suit, but a lot of people are resisting it. The things said during the full-time teachers’ association meeting were somewhat as follows. “We don’t want it” I heard someone say. “They want us to stop private practice if the age for superannuation is raised to 62. How can we stop private practice?” They could go back to the old days, when they were practising privately on the sly, I thought. Then they would not have to give up their non-practising allowance too. “It is our right to get promotions” said one Associate Professor. “We won’t be denied.” “It will result in a four-year delay for our promotions” another person said. “That is injustice to us.” It was correct, I thought. I knew they had made statement to these effects in the newspapers. But they would have four more years later. “Let us postpone the decision for a few years, until we get our promotions” said a union leader type. So that was it! Get the Professors out. Then pass the proposal, so that they would remain Professors for four extra years. I was feeling somewhat sick inside, thinking about what these people whom we had taught everything we knew were thinking about us. I wanted out not at 58, but that day because there was no fun in working with people who thought of self more than anything else. Some politicians were in favor of the proposal, some were against it, depending on their party decisions. The junior doctors were against the proposal because of need for immediate gains. No one had bothered to consider what the people wanted, for whom it would make a difference if the senior doctors stayed to treat them. That was the way things always were, I thought with an odd sense of detachment.