Anand Kumar has no complaints. Every weekend, the Pune resident has sex with his partner of 15 years, a woman of 39. So what’s so striking about that? Nothing, but for the fact that Kumar is an 81-year-old bachelor, a retired engineer.

Anand Kumar will be the envy of people half his age. But he, on the other hand, should be inspired by Mumbai’s Anwar Ali. Ali, who is into his third marriage, visited the department of sexual medicine at KEM Hospital last month to discuss his sex life. Ali wanted to know how he could be sexually more active with his 22-year-old bride. He has been performing only twice a week, he complained. Ali is 93.

Even some years ago, people would have dubbed a senior citizen like Ali a dirty old man. Some may still do so — but Ali and many others in his age group don’t care. Men in their eighties and early nineties are sexually active — and are proud of it.

“Seniors are getting increasingly vocal about their sexual desires, a shift from days when they thought of sex as an unnecessary luxury after children were born,” says D. Narayana Reddy, a veteran sexologist of Chennai.

Reddy has been consulted by four sexually active nonagenarians in the last three years. His patient profile — along with that of other noted sexologists — indicates that men and women from their seventies and up to their nineties have been seeking medical help to remain sexually active.

Take the case of Jignesh Shah, a 70-year-old Surat businessman. An accident three years ago seriously affected his sex life. Now, after some rejuvenating pills and a series of meetings with his sexologist, Shah is happy, and says that his 66-year-old wife is equally ecstatic. The Shahs have sex twice a day. “I wish I had seen the sexologist earlier,” he exclaims.

In the last five years, 3,603 men above 60 have consulted Dr Reddy for sexual woes — erectile dysfunctioning, dull libidos and so on. In the first five years of his practice in the early Eighties, Dr Reddy saw 152 men in this age group. Between the early and mid-Nineties, however, the number of men above 60 seeking sexual help rose four-fold in his chamber.

Doctors believe that not only are older men having more sex than ever before, but quite a few of them are ready to come out of the closet to talk about it. One reason for that is the rise in interactive programmes and columns on sex on television and in mainstream and regional newspapers and magazines. And with the spread of the Internet, senior citizens are also getting more adventurous — picking up ideas from pornographic sites, says Dr Rajan Bhonsale, a sexologist in Mumbai.

Add to this the fact that over the last four decades, life expectancy itself has risen by about 25 years for both men and women. And, with greater awareness and medical breakthroughs, men and women are healthier and more active now in their seventies and eighties than ever before.

Dr Vithal Prabhu, a veteran sexologist in Mumbai, sees this as a post-globalisation phenomenon. “Their attitude is: ‘I have the money, so I must enjoy sex.’ Life is seen as one meant for enjoyment,” he adds.

Equally significant is the fact that even older women are looking at ways of enhancing their sex lives. Doctors, of course, still hold on to the findings of the guru of sex research, Alfred Kinsey, according to which men in the 16-60 age group are four times more sexually active than women. Yet many stress that they have their share of women patients — even though they are still greatly outnumbered by men.

“But women are even bringing their men for help,” says Dr Raj Brahmabhatt, a sexologist and family counsellor in Mumbai. Women above 60, who featured nowhere on Dr Reddy’s patient list till 1997, have now crossed the 100 mark.

Gurvinder Kalra, a resident doctor at the BYL Nair Hospital in Mumbai, who is part of a geriatric sexuality study conducted in the hospital, was taken aback by a 70-year-old woman respondent who came back with a powerful counter question when asked for her opinion on old age and sex in a recent survey. “Who says sex suffers in old age,” she shot back. Other women interviewees over 65, too, appeared comfortable talking about their sexuality. “They put my own awkwardness at ease,” smiles the young doctor.

While sexologists rue the fact that physicians and surgeons are inadequately prepared to answer older patients’ sex related queries, senior citizens have been confronting their specialists with all kinds of probing questions. “One in 10 patients asks me if they can lead a normal sex life after a bypass surgery. And 10 per cent of them are seventy plus,” says Ashok Bandyopadhyay, chief cardiac surgeon at Peerless Hospital, Calcutta. The doctor’s verdict: “Yes, if the heart has not suffered too much damage before surgery. Though sex will have to wait until three months after bypass, to allow the breastbone (cut during surgery) to heal.”

Dr Madhavi Gunasheela, a rehabilitation specialist in Bangalore, sees declining inhibitions, with women from their mid sixties to seventies seeking her advice on the do’s and don’ts of sex after a knee or a hip replacement surgery. Women with arthritis have approached her with similar queries.

Even though many women think they ought to slow down after menopause, experts say the end of menstruation does not mean the end of sex. Doctors tell their women patients that when the uterus slows down on its oestrogen production around menopause, the lesser known supra renal or adrenal gland sitting atop the kidneys takes it upon itself to keep their sex drive alive by producing the male hormone, testosterone.

If a post-menopausal woman wants to keep her sex drive active, the only way is to “use it or lose it,” says Dr Brahmabhatt. Besides keeping the oestrogen levels up, sex for older women is as good as any sport — it helps lower the risk of fractures, the same way it keeps a man’s prostate from enlarging or turning malignant, says Dr Prabhu. Dr Brahmabhatt routinely recommends early morning sex to his older patients for that is when testosterone levels are at their highest.

The India of 2007 does its bit to help with an older person’s sexual drive. Viagra pills — or clones — are readily available. With cheaper and more flights, people are travelling more than ever before — and often coming back home with sex toys. A 70-year-old businessman, Ashok Desai, goes on bi-annual sex jaunts to Thailand and recently returned with a toy for better sex.

Why not, asks Dr Pradeep Patkar, a Mumbai-based psychiatrist. “Older men may be low on performance or their responses may have regressed, but their ability to enjoy sex is not reduced. They can and must enjoy sex right through their ninth decade.”

Sex aids — from dildos to inflatable dolls — have turned out to be de rigueur with many seniors. Such toys are available in most metros. But even in so-called traditional states such as Gujarat, Viagra is becoming popular, says Dr Paras Shah, a sexologist in Ahmedabad, whose patient list has roughly 15 per cent people above 65. Shah knows of cases where older people have been discussing the use of Viagra with their children.

But, of course, not all older men and women have it so good. Many of the older people’s sexual problems have little to do with ability, but centre on lack of privacy. “The bedroom, in most houses, is offered to the young couple in the family, while the grandmother sleeps with the grandchildren and her husband in the verandah,” says Dr Prabhu.

Yet some old prejudices — such as the belief that wrinkles, sagging skin or gray hair deter sex — are being broken. But, as Dr Kalra observes, the sexual activities of older people are not necessarily about moves and counter moves. “It’s often about tender acts like touching, kissing and, above all, emotions.

What is clear, though, that older men and women — a section of them, anyway — have rejected the concept of vanvyasâ — the withdrawing, at a certain age, from conjugal or domestic life. Instead, it appears that they are reacting to the three little words that a global sportswear brand flaunts. Just do it, it says.