The Union Cabinet has raised the retirement age of government employees to 60 years. As if on cue, the minimum age for a person to contest an election has been reduced to 21. So what's the big deal, you might ask.

While the world has been moving towards the empowerment of the young, India has the remarkable distinction of relying increasingly on age and experience. You can't quibble with the increase in the civil servants' retirement age to 60. But then, if 60 is the fair retirement age for the civil servant how is it that we find it impossible to take seriously any leader below the age of 70?

The key leaders in all the major national political parties are on the wrong side of 65. Atal Behari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Kushabhau Thakre, Sitaram Kesri, K. Karunakaran, Arjun Singh, Inder KumarGujral, all the long-marchers in the CPI(M) pantheon and so on.

Also survey the states. Parkash Singh Badal in Punjab, Bansi Lal in Haryana, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat in Rajasthan, J.B. Patnaik in Orissa, Keshubhai Patel in Gujarat and indeed, the oldest and wisest of them all, Jyoti Basu in West Bengal. Manohar Joshi at 60 may seem to be holding aloft the standard of the Maharashtrian youth in Mumbai, but then he is only a figurehead. The real power lies in the ageing hands of the remote control.

The governors and the succession of presidents have obviously packed even more wisdom and decades than these leaders. At least two, in recent times, have continued as governors well into their nineties. And who are the exceptions to this rule?

Sonia Gandhi, Farooq Abdullah, Chandrababu Naidu and, at a pinch, Rangarajan Kumaramangalam. You might add a few more names to this list. But it will be difficult to find many who do not owe their success in defying the age-wisdom barrier to heredity. You have to be a sonor daughter, a widow or even son-in-law of a prominent political leader to be taken seriously even in your fifties. Or wait another two decades. So a Madhavrao Scindia at 53 -- and a grandfather -- is still told by his partymen that he is young, that he needs more experience before he can be trusted with higher responsibility. Even the CPI(M) would encourage its younger stars to hold forth on Star and DD while the real power still remains with the Basus, Nayanars and Surjeets.

Just what is it that makes us Indians believe so strongly that wisdom and trustworthiness in public lifeare a post-seventies, post-bypass or post-prostatic phenomenon? Why is it that while a public servant must retire to his vanprastha at 60, a leader only begins to be taken seriously thereabouts? Indeed, life is not so unfair to civil servants either, particularly those from the foreign service. Even they acquire greater stature, intellect, credibility and even energy after retirement. The list of retired civil servants who now holdjobs more powerful and responsible than they ever held in their active careers would consume the rest of this column.

In our cultural history and religious tradition the wise man was the white-bearded sage who often lived long enough to transcend the reigns of several successive rulers. Age equals wisdom was also very much a post-Buddhism East Asian phenomenon. But you can't really push that analogy too far here. Most of our sovereigns -- even gods and goddesses -- were young, fit and virile. So what went wrong somewhere down the post-Independence decades? It could be the wiles of the old men, or the failure of the young to fire our imagination.

In fact the one time we had, in Rajiv, a young leader with a young team we trusted, we were let down so badly that we'd rather stick to the known devils than take any chances.

Our political pantheon today stands far in contrast with the rest of the world's. Bill Clinton will retire at 52 as a two-term president. Tony Blair, Alain Juppe, even Nawaz Sharif,Benazir Bhutto, Chandrika Kumara-tunge and Sheikh Hasina are still very much in their forties. Even the older leaders have young teams. The Chinese are changing too, albeit slowly. In India, the reverse has happened. Every single party has failed to produce a new, alternative leadership.

Unlike a Clinton redefining the post-Socialism Democrat and a Blair articulating the New Labour we merely have everybody still harping on the freedom movement, or on one Gandhi or the other. Where are the big new ideas, the great new dreams? In a world shrunk by the microchip, the satellite and the wide-bodied jet, what matters is creative ideas and not mere experience.

This is the age where whizkids in their thirties are becoming chief executives of leading software corporations and retiring from fatigue or sheer boredom by the mid-forties. In this environment, Deng Xiaoping is perhaps the only one to have redeemed his age as he understood and appreciated the need for and the essence of change. Narasimha Rao cametantalisingly close to it.

Don't hold people's age and experience against them, but just see the incongruity of reducing the age of election in a system where nobody below 60 is taken seriously. Where even Sitaram Kesri and Karunakaran believe that they are the solution to all of India's problems. This will only widen the generation gap in an already geriatric political universe.

Today Blair and Clinton talk of new ideas in education, of the schooling system, of contemporary social problems, because they relate to their teenaged school-going children. Our leaders -- irrespective of party affiliation -- carry on as if nothing of note has happened in India since the freedom movement.

We will bring in younger people into our Parliament, reserve one-third of the House for women, institute voluntary retirement schemes to keep the workforce young in our enterprises, but no one will talk of a retirement age for the politician. A great democracy we are, but we shall also have the unique distinction of being theonly one in the world to enter the new millennium hobbling on a walking stick, shoulders bent under the weight of ancient wisdom.