Sayan Hazra

In a nation sprinting toward its future, Sayan Hazra turned his lens backward to those quietly being left behind. India is growing younger, faster, louder. But in the shadows of its booming cities and fractured families are its elders, millions of them, silently fading from view. Over the course of a year, Sayan documented the lives of senior citizens in a care home in southern India. What he uncovered wasn’t just a story about aging; it was a portrait of a society in flux, and a quiet but piercing indictment of how we treat those who once carried our weight. As of 2023, India is home to more than 149 million people aged 60 and above. By 2050, that number will surpass 319 million, nearly one in every five Indians. Globally too, the elderly population is rising sharply: from 1.1 billion in 2022 to a projected 2.1 billion by 2050, according to the United Nations. But statistics only tell part of the story. The deeper question is, where are these elders headed? And are we even looking? Joint families have splintered into nuclear ones. Children migrate, often thousands of miles away, in pursuit of ambition. Left behind are parents in bodies that ache and minds that remember too much. Sumati, 76, told Sayan, “I don’t want to burden my children”. Parameswar, 80, practices yoga alone each morning, his wife of five decades now gone. Sarada, 93, once shuttled between her sons’ homes like baggage until she chose the silence of a care home over the noise of feeling unwanted. In these homes, Sayan found not despair, but something even more haunting: acceptance. Tea shared like clockwork. News read through cataract-clouded eyes. Prayers whispered not in hope, but out of habit. The absence speaks louder than the presence—of family, of belonging, of being seen. This work is more than a photo essay. It is a reckoning. A reminder that the true measure of a society lies in how it treats its elders, not just when they are useful, but when they are not. We cannot photograph away loneliness. But we can confront it. We can bear witness. Sayan’s work holds up a mirror for families, policy makers, and all of us racing ahead. The question it asks is both simple and profound: What kind of future are we building if we abandon the very hands that built our past?