Ketaki Chowkhani

“Who will look after you when you are old and sick” is a question that is often asked to aging single people, sometimes out of genuine concern and more often to chide them about how they missed the bus of marriage and coupledom. This question becomes more poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for long-term older single people living alone. Under the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007, children are required to look after their parents.1 While this act is undergoing some changes in recent times, it still does not include the role of non-kin in later life caregiving.2 The law, hence, does not recognize single people’s existence in old age, especially those who are never married and without children. Even legal heirs are not bound by the law
to look after their guardians.
Unlike elsewhere, the age of retirement in India is 60 years. Hence, those who are single and do not have children to look after them need to start planning for their old age sooner than those who have children, often from the ages of 40 and 50 onward. This demographic needs to already plan successfully aging alone, especially because they don’t have children to look after them, which renders them non-existent in the face of the law. Legally, they do not have “anyone” to look after them since they do not have children, but as I shall demonstrate, they socially have mobilized a network of support to counter the gaps in the law.

In this chapter, I examine self-care strategies long-term single people, specifically between the ages of 40 and 50, used during the COVID-19 pandemic lock-down to manage chronic illness and maintain health and well-being. The chapter uncovers how studying older single people’s lives contributes to understanding diverse strategies of self-care and reconfigures caregiving issues outside the traditional family, especially in the case where the law does not recognize their existence. The study provides us with a two-pronged insight, one into caregiving
practices among older single people living alone, and two, into successfully aging alone. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section examines the self-care practices employed by long-term single people living alone; the second section examines their social support system with regard to care and illness; and the third section theorizes care and aging from a singlehood standpoint.

The intention of this article is to examine women’s experiences of
consuming pornography and to discuss what these tell us about
female sexuality. The article attempts to open up a debate about
young women’s viewership of pornography in urban India, asking
what are the dangers and risks for them in viewing pornography
online; what are the possibilities for pleasure; and how are sexual
subjectivities and bodies constructed through their consumption?

Claire Manship belted songs out the window. Ketaki Chowkhani began barking at a stray puppy. Blake Mitchell performed in drag. As millions of people grapple with isolation in a pandemic, those who live alone face a particular kind of solitude. More people live alone now than at any other time in history, a seismic shift from even a half-century ago, and one fueled largely by women's economic rise. Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing, of course, and many people who live by themselves spend little time alone. Until, perhaps, a pandemic hits. Weeks or months into the stay-at-home orders worldwide, we wanted to know how solo dwellers were faring. What were they doing to keep themselves occupied? What did they most long for? What did they feel liberated to live without? More than 2,000 readers shared their stories and their photos. Here are some of them.