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Mangaluru: There are numerous cases of parents being abandoned in Mangaluru, according to Corrine Rasquinha, Founder of White Doves, which runs a shelter for the destitute and abandoned persons.

Speaking at a seminar on the elderly at Dr. M.V. Shetty College of Social Work on Friday, Ms. Rasquinha gave the example of Ramanna, who sold his gold chain to arrange the marriage of his daughter but was found on the road, abandoned. “Whatever amount of love we (White Doves) gave was not enough. He yearned for the love of his family,” she said. Pleading with people not to abandon the elderly, she asked them to remember that “we are here because of them”. She felt the disappearance of the joint family system and reduction of respect for the elderly was to blame for the situation. She asked people to remember that if they treated their elderly badly, they would suffer a similar fate in their twilight years. “What goes around, comes around,” she emphasised. Parents must secure their future by saving for old age Geriatric care specialist and Professor at Kasturba Medical College, here, Prabha Adhikari, said people wrongly thought they should sacrifice everything for the welfare of their children. She advised people to save for their old age and maintain physical fitness to reduce abuse and neglect at old age. Both the speakers said one needed to be careful about “caregivers” hired for the elderly. Ms. Rasquina cited the example how a woman residing on Jail Road used to be beaten up with her walking stick as her children lived abroad. At her intervention she had to be shifted to a home for senior citizens. Dr. Adhikari said an incident in which a caregiver had sexually abused an aged woman who could not talk, had shaken her terribly. She also narrated an incident of how a nurse earning a fat pension used to be exploited by her own daughter under the false claim of being a cancer patient. White Doves’ Founder Corrine Rasquinha said that she was able to overcome third stage cancer because of the prayers of the elderly housed in the destitute home she runs at Matadakani. “If I, as a cancer patient, can take care of 120 persons, why can’t you take care of one person?,” she said. “I have survived cancer for five years. Take care of the elderly, you will be blessed."