BENGALURU: Loneliness, eerie silence and stress: senior citizens have been through an emotional ride during the pandemic. To keep them engaged, many Bengaluru-based companies are making room to include seniors in their internship programmes in sectors like IT, real estate, law, among others. Interestingly, this comes at a time when the Hollywood film The Intern is being remade in Hindi and will star Amitabh Bachchan and Bengaluru girl Deepika Padukone.
For example, Origami Creative, a marketing agency in Bengaluru, launched a campaign called GrandAdventure recently to bridge the gap between seniors and organisations. Laeeq Ali, the founder of the agency, believes that the pandemic has left many seniors devastated, mentally.
“We know a lot of talented senior citizens who are idle at home. We wanted to create a revenue space for them and came up with the idea of paid internships. We have received over 50 entries and are sending them to various companies in different verticals, construction, hospitality, IT, law firms, etc. We want to collaborate with more companies in the coming days as we have received a good response from senior citizens towards this initiative,” says Ali, who is also the president of The Advertising Club Bangalore.
Maaz Dawood, the owner of Monarch Groups, a construction company, says, “From the entries we have received so far, all of them have rich experience in the fields of real estate, engineering and architecture. We will be hiring two of them for our upcoming project on Old Madras Road, which has 425 apartments. We want their expertise in understanding what kind of amenities are required for seniors and the differently-abled,” he says, adding, “It will be more of a consultancy and advisory role with the option to work from home. For the one-month internship, we will pay anywhere between Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000.”
Kiran Sivdas, the co-founder of Enventure, a supply chain solutions company, has received 10 applications from seniors from different cities and has selected one candidate from Bengaluru for the internship. The company is expected to short-list other candidates in the months to come.
“We are not looking at any particular skill set; we are open to offering them internships depending upon their area of expertise. The roles and responsibilities include content writing, branding and marketing.” says Sivdas, who is open to extending the internship of the candidate based on their performances.
Feeling that seniors have been “ignored” during the pandemic, Santosh Singh, business head for south India of Fox Mandal, a law firm based in Bengaluru, says, “We are offering seniors the role of supporting an internal team with content development; we are not looking for a candidate with a legal background. This sort of initiative was long overdue.”
For details visit the Instagram page Origami Creative.