A baby girl!
Yeaaahhh..
Now that you have surpassed your initial glee of becoming a parent, you must send her to school. Not just any school.. An English Medium one! Preferably in a girls’ school..so she does not get into any ‘unnecessary mess’. What follows? Well, if she scores reasonably well in her exams or is awarded exceptionally heavy and charmingly incomprehensible books at the end of every academic year … You are definitely doing fantastically well as a parent.
Of course you haven’t ignored the envious looks from those parents whose wards barely manage to surpass the 50% mark. And once she is out of her school, you hope, pray , plead and strike all sorts of deals with the All Mighty, so your one and only..beautiful little girl gets into a college worth writing home about. Of course if your child has been smoothly hovering about the coveted 90-95% mark, your prayers to the one above would be as decent as anyone would expect.
College..
Well, if she doesn’t manage to get into an impressive college, you gradually begin to nurture the belief..that a good college is really not a big deal..or it slowly enters your mind… Why the hell did I not have another kid?? And if you already have one, its high time..you buy some extra samosas for him/ her on your way home or spend your bonus on the magical tuition teacher the neighbours have been talking about!
Either way…as she cruises through her college days..and gets really comfortable in her ‘purani jeans’ you begin to wonder, is she really dating that skinny guy in maternity pants? What do they do besides having coffee? Isn’t she hanging out at Sheila’s place just too often?
Sigh… I wish I could get back my college days.. I wish her dad would go for a walk more often!
A few unexplainable days, some mails from college mysteriously performing a vanishing act and your daughter comes home proudly declaring that she is now a graduate! While neighbours and family members, no longer envious of her success begin to ‘notice’ her for all the ‘obvious’ reasons. Anyhow …you have suddenly established yourself as a lady with a modern outlook you annouce to the world that your daughter has more to do than merely tie the bloody knot!
So your daughter steps into more advanced study and then finds herself a job in a fancy, swanky office where you have never dreamt of walking into, unless to meet your husband, you know you have made the right decision!
However the ‘unexplainable days’ and night outs with Sheila continues… but you chose to ignore it as you are still quite kicked with the almost sinful pleasure generated in you when you narrate your daughter’s success to your neighbours!
However as time goes by, you no longer get a kick out of her success and in fact you don’t even care about the new feverishly expensive purse she gave you on your birthday; you simply want to see her get married and have a family just the way things happened in your times!
Well, there are three things you don’t want your daughter to say.
- I want to of marry Sheila
- I want to completely focus on my career and I don’t want to get into any sort of marital contract till the next 5 years
- I want to become a CEO and then marry.
Lets us imagine, our daughter’s response was somewhere between 2 and 3.
Suddenly for you, it does not matter how much she scored in school, how she graduated smoothly in spite of the strange man whose hairdo pleaded for the want of a comb and how she has been making enough money to sustain the entire family.
Lovely thought, shows the hypocrisy of our times that often encourages women to be 'liberal' but when it comes to marriage or raising a family, none of it matters. May be we don't really want to see independent women!
ReplyDeleteIt is The Story of most women around me.. Time moving at a snail's pace for us, the boundaries of our lives still being drawn with straight rulers! The obsession of having a better life for their child is driving parents mad.. or they just want to be able to control it?
ReplyDeleteWe live in transitional time when the tradition is revised and almost always approaches and steals through under the garb of parent emotions of their social status....so children as an aspect of the show off of their parents was something which used to exist for the upper classes where the aspect of their child education was a mere sign of the care of the parents and could be used to uphold their own positions in society...for others it used to be a matter of getting the girl educated since the nuove educated engg. and management etc. guys were all looking for girls with education which again could sustain their own social standing infront of their own colleagues(common we have to fake being modern too, so we need convent educated girls)...obviously when the opportunity arose these guys also did not shy away from taking huge dowries which too boosted their social standing.....
ReplyDeletewhat if our society thinks its very modern or something and thinks of giving education and all the basic foundation of the society be it the upper class and more so the middle class it is totally feudal in nature...