Why should a judge retire at 65 or 62?

Why should there be a retirement age? And why 65? It seems Attorney General Goolam E Vahanvati took great pains to examine this question. He recalled Ernest Hemingway remarks:

“Retirement is the ugliest word in the English language.”
Mark Twain once said about superannuation: “It is the time when one acquires sufficient experience and it is a time when you are forced to retire.”

W Gifford Jones too questions retirement. “Nobody should ever retire, since Michelangelo was carving the Rondanini just before he died at 89, and Verdi finished his opera Falstaff at 80,” he says.
But the great minds who drafted our Constitution thought otherwise, and fixed 65 as the retirement age for Supreme Court judges and 62 for high court judges.

The debate over retirement came up when the Supreme Court Bar Association hosted a function for outgoing chief justice KG Balakrishnan and incoming chief justice SH Kapadia.

“If Michelangelo had to read the voluminous briefs that judges do, he too would have preferred retirement at a certain age,” said Kapadia, leaving the audience in splits.

What do judges do, asked newly-appointed SC Bar Association president Ram Jethmalani, rhetorically. “They scan bulky appeals, affidavits full of falsehood and lies, and hear arguments by lawyers who might not even believe what they are asserting… for a judge, retirement is a relief,” he added.

Incidentally, neither our lawyers nor our law-makers retire, but judges have to unless they opt for a post-retirement government job or are nominated to the Rajya Sabha. If none of the above happens, then the judge always has the option of getting engaged in arbitration and counselling, which can be highly awarding.