Now, the other view is, how you can get the best service out of an individual for the nation. Each country spends a lot of money for training a person. Now, we have to get the best out of the training you give to a person. You should not, when he is quite trained and completely fit, discard him and get an untrained person to start afresh. Now, it is difficult, of course, to say when a person is not working to the peak of his capacity. In different professions the peak may be different with regard to age. Obviously a miner cannot work as a miner at sixty or anywhere near sixty. An intellectual worker may work more. So also about writers. It will be manifestly absurd to say that a writer must not write after a certain age, because he is intellectually weak. Or for the matter of that, I rather doubt whether honourable Members of this Assembly will think of fixing an upper age-limit for membership of this Assembly, or for any Cabinet ministership or anything of that kind. We do not do it. But the fact is, when you reach certain top grades where you require absolutely first-class personnel, then it is a dangerous thing to fix a limit which might exclude these first-rate men. I would give you one instance which came up in another place. It was the case of scientists. In such a case, can we say that he cannot work because he has reached the age of sixty? As a matter of fact, some of the greatest scientists have done their finest work after they reached that age. Take Einstein. I do not know what his age is, but certainly it should be far above sixty; and Einstein is still the greatest scientist of the age. Is any government going to tell him, “Because you are sixty, we cannot use you, you make your experiments privately”?. There are some scientists in India-first class scientists-and the question came up before me, should they retire? I pointed out that we are already short of first-rate men, and if you just push them out because of some rules fixed for some administrative purposes, which have nothing to do with the highest class of inventive brain work, it would be a calamity for us. We would not get even the few persons we have got for our purpose.
