The presentation is based on my doctoral project, where I explore the everyday blurring of leisure and its subjective experience among older men and women in India (aged 55-80). The focus of the presentation will be discussing everyday experiences of leisure time, how older adults differentiate leisure time from free time, and how these social dimensions alter older adults’ perception of time (both its availability and absence of it). For this, I capitalize on the cultural gerontological framework where time and embodiment are essential in understanding how aging is understood in a cultural context. In the Indian context, this is under the ambit of growing consumerism and older adults market segmentation for a select section of urban Indians. Mundane and routinized consumption is immersed in everyday lives and can be well-understood through ordinary consumer practices people follow. This will allow contribution towards perspectives and differences in growing old. Thus, contributes to questions of time use and time poverty among older adults and if temporal inequalities continue to exist in later life. This will be in contrast to the large volume of scholarship that has examined the effects of recent socio-demographic changes on the lives of older adults in terms of their living arrangements, health outcomes, social security provisions, and care frameworks. Moreover, the discussion will also elucidate how time is experienced differently across class, gender, and family arrangements. All in all, the contribution of this talk will be to share contemporary ways of aging, keeping in mind the temporal and embodiment aspects of cultural gerontology.
