What is Old Age? Elderly’s Perception and Understanding: A Qualitative Study

The current study focuses on the lives of the elderly people and tries to understand how they conceptualise old age and how they believe their lives to be as they get older. The study was conducted among two groups of old people—one living in their homes and the other in religious ashrams—to accomplish this goal. Participants were surveyed individually in 16 separate interviews for the data, which were then analysed using thematic analysis to provide themes. The findings indicate that, for the most part, both participant groups viewed old age as a time of physical and mental deterioration as well as changes in appearance brought on by ageing. Second, both participant groups saw this age as a time of eroding social ties. Participants also varied in how they felt about getting older. The elderly who resided in ashrams were positive and demonstrated their ability to have spiritual experiences; in contrast, the elderly who lived alone had a pessimistic outlook and believed that old age was the result of previous bad acts

Social Production and Consumption of Space: A Lefebvrian Analysis of the Kumbh Mela

Kumbh Mela is the world’s largest pilgrimage gathering on the shores of the River Ganges. Drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) trialectics of space framework, this paper interrogates the spatial dynamics of the Kumbh Mela through the spatial meanings espoused by local and international pilgrims. Accounting for dominant discourses that frame the event as occurring in and around a sacred waterscape, five focus groups with pilgrims were conducted at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India. The findings indicate that local pilgrims were aware of river pollution, but they used discursive strategies to decouple this material fact from their lived spiritual experiences; from this vantage point the sacred was believed to be insulated from the secular. International pilgrims’ perceptions significantly differed, from those of their local counterparts, in that the sacred waterscape was seen as polluted and the onus was on them to remedy what they believed locals had neglected to do; for this group cleaning the River was a sacred act. The findings indicate that despite the existence of dominant spatial conceptualisations of a sacred waterscape, through use of the space, new and often competing spatial meanings arise that illuminate our understanding of the human condition and the social relations therewithin