deviousways

A couple of months ago, a former national level cricketer's father went missing in Mysore's Devaraja Market. The local police sprang into action and the gentleman was found in a couple of hours. In that time, though he had wandered some 5 km from the spot he was last seen (the market). News reports quoted the police as saying the elderly gentleman suffered from “age-related forgetfulness”. Now, I don't know if the cricketer's dad has some form of dementia. If he does, I do hope he is getting treatment (medicines can slow the process of brain degeneration but not halt or reverse it). I also hope that his fasmart technology, privacy, Facebook, mily is alert always whenever they go anywhere. Because the elderly gentleman, if he has dementia, can easily go missing again. Such wandering is a behaviour associated with dementia. According to the Alzheimer's Association of the US (www.alz.org), six in 10 people with dementia will wander. More frighteningly, res...

An old man accosted me yesterday morning. Accosted is too strong a word, but I am not sure how else to put it. He saw me just as I walked out of our apartment building, and started talking. Something about telegrams and mental illness and NIMHANs and medicines.... All the time, I was thinking, "Oh hell, why me, why me! Why can't he go away and bother someone else"? I was going to pick up little man and I had just 10 minutes to go. But he just wouldn't walk away and kept rambling on. Was he mentally ill? I am not sure, he certainly appeared lucid enough. He didn't seem disoriented or lost, as a person with dementia would seem to be. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Naveen, our building's security guard (who lives here with his family), watching. I glanced uncertainly at him, hoping he would come shoo the man away. He didn't. And yet, I didn't, couldn't, walk on, pretending this old man didn't exist. Instead I wondered why was he doin...