The Old Men And The C

The life expectancy of an Indian is 64.8 years. (As of 2009; source World Bank. http://www.worldbank.org/).

Sample this:

Pratibha Patil – 76 years

Manmohan Singh – 79 years

Pranab Mukherjee – 75 years

P Chidambaram – 66 years

Sonia Gandhi – 64 years

L K Advani – 83 years

Shared Pawar – 70 years

Politicians in India, on an average, outperform the average Indian in terms of longevity by miles or should I say years. Now, one could argue that we are a looking at people who occupy select positions which are most likely to have the people with experience (which will come with age) and therefore will be relatively older people (in other words an equivalent of a sampling bias) (One could also argue that Pratibha Patil is not a politician but let’s not get into that discussion.)

So let’s look at another set of data:

The President of the United States (POTUS – I love that term): Barack Obama – 50 years

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: David Cameron – 44 years

The President of France: Nicolas Sarkozy – 56 years

The Prime Minister of Pakistan: Yousaf Raza Gillani – 59 years

The President of Pakistan: Asif Ali Zardari – 56 Years

The President of Russia : Dmitry Medvedev – 56 Years

The President of China: Hu Jintao – 68 years (will step down in 2013)

The Prime Minister of Australia: Julia Gillard – 50 years

Well I’m sure that the data wouldn’t be different if we dug deeper into the ages of other politicians in these countries. This leads me to conclude that the politics in general, across the world (excluding India) does not attract (or retain) too many senior citizens.

What’s new one may ask. We are well aware that senior citizens dominate Indian politics refusing to give way to the youth (including presumably non political organizations such as the sports bodies). As is our wont, there have been several debates, articles and anguished exclamations by new anchors on television etc belaboring this point. However, the fact that older people should not (or should) lead Indian politics is not the point that I am trying to make.

Each one of you would have witnessed, read or heard of several incidents involving artists, doctors, lawyers, bankers, software professionals, salesmen, BPO employees etc. dying young. Many of them at their work.

I have not heard these stories about Indian politicians.

So the point that I am trying to make is that being in Indian politics is actually enhancing their life span. To me it appears that this warrants further investigation (like many other things warranting investigation involving our much loved politicians).

Who knows? These investigations may help medical sciences immensely.

Note 1) I sincerely hope that I haven’t breached any of the privileges accorded to our politicians (which includes calling each other names, insulting and abusing each other; we can’t do the same to them).

Note 2) Apologies to the soul of Ernest Hemingway for having parodied the title of his most famous work. The ‘C’ in the title refers to the ‘chair’ the word most ubiquitously used to describe the greed for power in Indian politics. Maybe that’s the elixir that the scientists should take up for evaluation first.

Note 3) I may be accused of bias and selective representation of facts in this post. I think everyone does that all the time when presenting their views.