Something changes in your forties. A major part of your headspace shifts to your parents and grandparents. Reverse parenting, a friend called it, and the phrase stuck because it's exactly right. The people who were your anchors start needing you the way you once needed them. And most of us aren't there to see it daily, because we moved. We're all urban migrants. I'm in Bangalore, my brother's in Japan, and our family is in Pune. So you fly down every few months, compress all your love and worry into a few days, and try to do something useful before you leave. Usually, this means technology. You buy devices. You set up apps. You explain things three times and hope something sticks. And every visit, you realise how inadequate your understanding and the tech stack you've been trying to get them to use is vs what they actually need.
My Nanaji (maternal grandad), God bless him always, is a fit ninety-five. He served in the Indian Army from 1947 to 1986, and then, apparently, because four decades of active service wasn't enough, did another 20 years in corporate. We finally got him to stop around 2004. Even then, he'd say he wanted to do more. That's the man. Sharp, restless. Always needing a problem to solve, a conversation to have, a reason to get dressed and step out of the house.
And he still does. On the first of every month, he goes to the bank to withdraw his pension. Physically. Signs the cheque himself. He likes to carry cash. Then he'll go out with his driver to the fruit vendors he's been buying from for years, pick his vegetables, and buy what he needs. I've tried everything to modernise this. Your relationship manager should come to the house. Let me set up a banking app. We can get everything from Instamart; you don't have to go anywhere. He listens patiently every time. And then he says, " But what would I do with so much convenience?"
He means it. He looks forward to that bank trip. It's the first of the month. It's a reason to step out, to see the teller who knows his name, to walk through a neighbourhood he's lived in for decades. The fruit vendor knows what he likes. The interaction is the point. Take all of that away, and you haven't simplified his life. You've hollowed it out.
But here's what took me longer to see. There are things my Nanu wants to keep doing exactly the way he's always done them. Nobody needs to optimise that. But there are quieter things, things he doesn't talk about as much, where something is missing. His children and grandchildren, all of us, we call as often as we can. A couple of times a day, ten or fifteen minutes. We ask how he's doing, he says he's fine, we say we love him, and we hang up. But those calls aren't what he's really after. What he wants is a long conversation. The kind where you sit with a thought, turn it over, talk through a doubt, and get into something that matters. He listens to Gurbani every morning. He has questions about the verses, ideas he wants to explore. But who does he explore them with? The phone calls are check-ins. They're not conversations. And in the hours between those calls, who's talking to him? How much of his mind is getting used? These aren't questions I was asking five years ago. Every visit to Pune reveals a different layer. Ageing and technology are more complicated than I thought.
This trip, I tried something. I've been deep in AI and voice experiments, building things, testing things, and I keep thinking about what would actually be useful for him. Not another gadget. Something that meets him where he is. So I put ChatGPT on voice mode, set it to Punjabi, sat down next to him, and said: Just talk to it. About anything you want.
He gave me the look. The one he gives every piece of technology that's ever been brought into that house. Patient scepticism. A man who's been asked to be impressed too many times. But then, slowly, he began to speak. He talked about a shlok from Gurbani, a verse he's recited every morning for longer than I've been alive. It took him a moment to adjust to the strangeness of talking to something that isn't a person. But then something shifted. The AI responded in Punjabi. Fluently. Patiently. It engaged with what he'd said about the verse, explained its interpretation thoughtfully, and then waited. Just waited, the way a good conversational partner does.
He leaned in. It took him some time to believe he was talking to a machine and not a person. He kept going. I nudged him: ki aur kya poochna chahte ho aap? What else do you want to ask? He had a fully engaged conversation with something inanimate for seven or eight minutes. Those eight minutes were important for me to see. My Nanu, a man who has dismissed every screen, app, and gadget his family has brought him for twenty years, was genuinely engaged. Not because the technology was simpler or the buttons were bigger. Because it talked to him. In his language. About what mattered to him. And it had nowhere else to be.
That's when something clicked. Not the banking app. Not the Instamart order. Not the relationship manager at the door. This is what it was supposed to be for.
I think about the echo chambers elderly people live inside. The world gets smaller. The same news on repeat. The long hours with nobody to talk to, or nobody who has the time to really talk. The children and grandchildren call, and they mean well, but ten minutes between meetings isn't a conversation. It's a wellness check. My Nanu has a mind that was never still. He served for four decades, worked for two more, and still says he wants to do more. So what does it mean that the most engaged I've seen him with a screen in years was those eight minutes in Punjabi about Gurbani?
It means we've been building the wrong things. For decades, technology for the elderly has meant bigger buttons, simpler menus, and fall-detection bracelets. As if the main problem of being ninety is that your fingers don't work. The main problem, from where I sit, is that nobody's talking to you. Not really. Not in a way that meets your mind where it actually lives. And for the first time, something can.
I keep imagining a full stack built for the elderly. Part wishful thinking, part ambition, part something I genuinely believe is coming. Not one app. A whole approach. Something smart enough to know the difference between what my Nanu wants to keep doing the old way and where he actually needs help. Something that doesn't touch his bank trip but can hold a long conversation about Gurbani in Punjabi any morning he wants. Something that remembers what he said yesterday. That speaks his language. That doesn't condescend or simplify or rush. That treats a sharp ninety-five-year-old mind with the respect it deserves. Not a replacement for the family that calls. A presence in the hours between. A companion for the time we can't fill.
I've been bringing technology into that house in Pune for years. Most of it ended up in a drawer. What happened this trip was different. Not another incremental improvement. Something exponential. A technology that met my Nanu on his own terms, in his own language, and held his attention for eight straight minutes. If you've watched someone you love slowly disengage from the world, eight minutes of real engagement means everything.
Something is coming for the people who've been waiting the longest. And from where I sit, as a grandson and from every other hat I wear, I think it's the most exciting and most human thing anyone could build.