India is
growing old.
Listen.

Vṛddhasaṅkaṭa began as a research question I could not answer from a library. I wanted to understand the economic experience of ageing in India: the welfare gaps, the dependency structures, the policy failures. I had read the demographic literature and analysed the dependency ratios. What I did not understand was the texture of the experience, what it actually feels like to grow old in a country whose systems of protection speak a language you were never taught.

The gap between a model and the reality it describes is not a technical problem to be solved with better data. It is an epistemological one.

Across Bangalore and Uttarakhand I have now sat with fifteen people, recording lives that formal history has not preserved. Each conversation taught the same lesson from a different angle: the most important testimony rarely arrives in answer to the best question. It arrives in the digressions, in the silences, in the long minutes a man spends describing a mango tree before he mentions that his children stopped calling.

The archive pairs qualitative testimony with demographic evidence, setting each oral history against data on care economies, dependency ratios, pension coverage and welfare architecture. The aim is not to reduce lives to numbers. It is to stop the numbers from hiding the lives. Five interviews are presented here in full; research is ongoing.