On the Loose: Loyally Yours

In India, especially, parents, even the most emancipated and liberal ones, try to exert an incredible amount of control in their adult children’s lives. My mother is still scared, rather petrified of her 91-year-old mother, whose sarcastic barbs fly fast if she skips a weekly lunch with her. It’s wholly normal for parents to choose their kids’ careers and they also often consider it their birthright to decide who their children should marry.

Our culture relentlessly supports the idea that parents, simply by virtue of bringing us into this world, deserve unswerving gratitude and worship for all they sacrificed for us. So much so, the now-disgraced Asaram Bapu initiated a Mata Aur Pita Pujan Divas on February 14, 2012, as an option for Indian youth to celebrate Valentine’s Day in a new way. Asaram’s proposal was supported by many prominent politicians like Pranab Mukherjee. India has also got to be the only country where somebody would actually produce (and air) a TV show with a nauseating title like Maat Pitaah ke Charnon Mein Swarg, that ran on Colors in 2009. As a concept, a serial about respect for elders resonates with the audience and actually passes off as entertainment. Karan Johar’s cheesy film Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham was a hit and it had the tagline, “It’s all about loving your parents.”

Of all the relationships in life, the most sacred and revered bond common through history and every culture is the one between a parent and child. It is the only, truly, unconditional love. You can divorce a spouse, not speak to a sibling or fight with a friend but cutting off your own children has got to be one of the most difficult and heartbreaking experiences ever. For decades, people in India have gone through life toiling so tirelessly for future generations that it gives them a peculiar hold over kids well into adulthood. So, love, control, duty and guilt are inextricably intertwined. There is a sublime and, in my opinion, a completely misplaced expectation that no matter what you achieve or do, or how old you are, at home you must remain subservient (and forever grateful) to your parents, when actually respect flows both ways.

Cribbing about parents isn’t the prerogative only of surly teenagers. Put five friends in their 40s together and sooner, rather than later, the complaints start pouring out. An interfering parent is often the single greatest point of contention in a marriage. But mata pita mohis so deeply ingrained or hardwired into most of us that we tend to view parents philosophically and tolerantly and fervently hope our spouses will do the same. Even when they’re at their most provoking. It doesn’t help that the newspapers are full of stories of unimaginable cruelty by wicked, avaricious children who cast away old parents ruthlessly and grab their property. In the West, when there’s a parent-child estrangement, it’s assumed the parents must have done something terrible. Here, it’s the reverse. No one questions where the parent went wrong and the son and wicked daughter-in-law are almost always vilified. There is some breathing space required for every relationship to flourish. Even one that American writer James Salter describes, “Having a child beside one, at peace, is the realest, the deepest, the only joy”.

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