Work. Pause. Repeat.

Once upon a time, retiring meant a gold watch from one’s employer, a house (with a garden) in the suburbs, a small pension from a lifetime of investments, and years of boredom. It also meant cutting corners—but that scourge was not always as severe as now, thanks to inexorably increasing living costs.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming you spend Rs 30,000 a month and want to maintain the same standard of living when you retire, say, 15 years on, and inflation goes up at an average 6%, shows that you’ll need more than Rs 5 crore as a retirement nest egg. That means early retirement planning and disciplined investments, something few manage to do.

Add to that the spectre of longer-than-ever life expectancies, and finding gainful employment in the retired years becomes vital. An encore, or a second career, is thus becoming quite the thing with retired folk.
In Kolkata, Krishna Chhanda Mandal, 74, teaches the neighbourhood kids basic reading and writing in English. Thirty years ago, she had quit the state health-care services, where she used to provide family planning and welfare counselling. At the time, she wanted out of a full-time job, to spend time with her family. But soon after, she found that she needed to keep herself busy and went back to her first love, teaching English. She worked as a teacher in a school for slum children funded by NGOs. Today, ill health has forced her to quit the school, but kids still come home to learn.

That, in a nutshell, is what most retirees want: to get some income, but equally important, to keep their minds occupied. Europe, where a quarter of the population will be over 60 years by 2020, even has a funky name for it: active ageing. A paper titled ‘Creating Second Career Labour Markets’ by the European Policy Centre and German non-profit Bertelsmann Foundation recognises this as a key challenge at a time when policymakers the world over are preoccupied with youth employment issues, often at the cost of productive contribution from the elderly.

In India too, the youth have dominated labour-market conversations, thanks to their status as the harbinger of the “demographic dividend” that will catapult India’s productivity beyond ageing developed economies. But the hype does little to hook those who get sick of the rat race: the thirty- and fortysomethings who want to “do” stuff before they are too old to take risks.

The mid-career itch to do something different affects many professionals, but few act upon it for obvious reasons: It rocks the financial boat; it means starting from scratch in a new field all over again, and frequently from the bottom; it calls for acquiring new learning and new skills. “There are a lot of people trapped in jobs where they have to do things they don’t really enjoy,” says Puneet Jhajharia, who retired from corporate life as vice-president, technology, at Goldman Sachs, and set up CropConnect Enterprises, a platform that connects farmers with markets. “In most cases, it is very difficult to break out of that cycle.”

In the case of these younger “retirees”, the move is sometimes because of a push factor, whether it’s boredom, or lack of independence, or the eternal grouse that you can never make enough for yourself while working for someone else. Others are pulled towards enterprise or social service, or by a job vastly different from their regular grind.

Investment banker Neha Sethi claims she was plain bored after a stint with Bear Stearns in New York and another with Goldman Sachs in Mumbai. Today, she runs a dessert cafe in Mumbai called Sweetish House Mafia. Before starting the cafe, she sold baked goods out of a Nano car, which she drove around Mumbai.

“People willing to take risks and those who have some degree of financial security are more likely to pursue a second career,” says Moorthy Uppaluri, CEO of human resources firm Randstad India. And, of course, any previous experience will help in some way. “There might be functional and domain skills that a person develops which can be reused in a different domain,” says Uppaluri.

That’s something Delhi’s S. Natesh, 64, knows all about. A scientist who used to teach botany at the Delhi University, Natesh retired as senior advisor in the Department of Biotechnology. Actually, it’s a bit difficult to consider him a retired person at all; he works longer hours than most people who hold regular jobs. He now uses his vast experience in policymaking and outreach as advisor to the Delhi-based National Institute of Immunology and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. So, how is any of this different from his pre-retirement life? “I enjoyed my previous inning as well, but I am enjoying this a lot more,” he says. “I don’t have to answer parliament questions or RTI queries, and I can do a lot of things that I had no time for earlier.” Like writing a book on the heritage trees of India, which he hopes urban planners will refer to before indiscriminately chopping down trees.

His wife, Geetha Natesh, is a different sort of case study on working after retirement. She used to work in the finance ministry and took voluntary retirement 16 years ago to concentrate on raising two young girls.

Recently, the lack of work began to chafe, and she joined an agency under the Rajasthan government that does a wide array of policy research. “I never thought of this as a ‘second career’,” she says. “I just wanted to do something useful again.”

The Nateshes are doing what people half their age generally do: evaluate their skills and put them to good use in jobs that are fulfilling without being stressful. The difference is that the older couple can fall back on pensions, savings, and decades of experience if they get dissatisfied with their new work. That’s not often the case with the younger lot. “I knew I could fall back on my parents if I failed,” says Jhajharia frankly. “They would support me financially.”

Clearly, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to post-retirement careers. There are the classic retired bureaucrats and bank managers who set up as consultants. Then there are those like Natesh, who opt for fields connected with their areas of expertise. And there are the likes of former journalist P.J. Thomas, 81, who plan to chase their dream after retirement. Thomas, who started off as a reporter at the Mail newspaper (since shut), retired as editor of the Kerala section in the (now defunct) United States Information Service under the American Consulate in Chennai. The son of a prominent educationist, Thomas’s dream was to set up an educational institute in Kerala. Even before he retired, he had built a school in Ranni, a town in Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district. His wife, Elsy Thomas, a primary school teacher in Chennai, retired early to help give shape to Thomas’s dream. They ran Citadel, a residential-cum-day school, for over 10 years, till they gave it up in 2005 to live a fully retired life.

Ravi Kiran was in his forties and already CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group’s South East and South Asia region when he decided to give it all up. “I asked myself if for the next decade or two, I wanted to do the same thing I was doing, or if I should try something different,” he says. He now runs a startup, Friends of Ambition, advising small enterprises in tier II and tier III towns.

Like Thomas, Kiran too planned his move. Almost immediately after quitting Starcom, he enrolled in an executive development programme at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. “Without question, I’m happy with the way it has turned out,” he says.