Failing vision, a common problem among silvers, may land you as the butt of jokes. But a recent study offers hope, writes S Raghunath

As a silver leading a peaceful retired life, I have met my ignominious Waterloo, of all places, in an optometrist’s consulting room. The trouble started when over a period of time I started reading the morning newspaper holding it pressed against my bulbous nose, rather like a trombone player reading his music sheet. One fine day, the paper was rudely snatched away from me. The wife gave me marching orders, to go and see a competent optometrist without any further delay.

I stumbled into the optometrist’s room after, of course, wrongly straying into a chemist’s shop and a video-CD library. What could I do? To my hazy eyes, everything looked covered in an early morning mist. Pointing to an eye chart, which to me seemed at least a kilometre away, the optometrist asked me to read out letters in the second line. “M,” I said confidently. How was I to know it was Z? The optometrist scowled; placing his right hand over my left eye, he asked me to identify the next alphabet on the chart. “P,” I blurted out confidently, when in fact it was B. After a few more trials, he sighed, “You are myopic. Please call again tomorrow evening. I will have your glasses ready.”

So here I am, all shuffling and bumping into furniture and other impediments, not quite knowing just where I am headed for. Like Freemasons and Leftists, we short-sighted folks are objects of ridicule. Even if we wear the thinnest glasses, we are heartlessly dubbed “four eyes”. Heaven knows that our otherwise bright eyes have not become dim; so what if we pull our chair a mere 2 ft from the TV set and squint and peer with visible effort at the screen, we do successfully read the small print on horse racing forms and decipher the strange hieroglyphics on Scotch whisky bottles!

The normal-sighted are a cocky lot. They tap the meek-looking bespectacled chap haughtily and declare they have “a perfect 20/20”. For all you know, 20/20 might be their blood pressure (before breakfast), the aggregate marks they obtained in the lower kindergarten exam, or maybe their intelligence quotient (IQ). This latter assumption is borne out by the headline, ‘Near-sighted are smarter’, published in the prestigious British Medical Journal recently. Based on a joint Israeli-Danish study, the report claims that short-sighted people are slightly (but definitely) more intelligent than people with 20/20 vision and that, on an average, myopics score high IQ points than people with normal vision.

However, it’s too early for myopics to call for celebration or float on cloud nine. The finding of an American study is sure to drag them down to ‘terra firma’. This study suggests that myopics tend to be more forgetful and absentminded than people with normal vision. Now that we know this, women must be sympathetic and not berate their bespectacled husbands for forgetting important dates such as birthdays and wedding anniversaries, a common grouse, even after decades of marital life!

Meanwhile, going back to the earlier report, Israeli and Danish doctors have reported that army recruits who had an IQ of 128 or more habitually wore glasses and that 27.3 per cent of recruits with high IQ were short-sighted. I am sure you will agree these are more impressive statistics than a picayune 20/20. The study surmises that people who are smart tend to read more to keep their intelligence well-honed and that tires their eyes, leading to poor vision. The conclusion, then, is that the nearsighted are smarter in the upper storey. This should be defence enough against the baying 20/20 crowd. Hey, I cannot read what I have typed so far!

The Bengaluru-based writer is a pensioner who likes to look at life a little differently

Photograph by iStock
Featured in Harmony — Celebrate Age Magazine
December 2016