Skip to main content

India and joint families

Most Indians of my generation have grown up in a joint family setup. The family was always there for support, for strength and for sharing burden.

Mass migration to larger towns and cities broke up joint families giving rise to the nuclear families. The new Indian middle class was very happy to be free from the responsibilities of a joint family.

The joy was short lived. Soon the people realised that we may be westernised but our systems are not. Putting your kid in a crèche while going to work was not very good for the child. Or cooking a meal after coming back from work wasn't very pleasant. The bigger issue was the lack of support system in the nuclear families. The comfort of having your own around in times of need. We may quarrel often but still family is family.

Indians always find a way to make up for their shortcomings through jugaad. And that's exactly what we have done.

The joint family version 2 is a modified version of the joint family of yore but with a slight change. Now friends and neighbours are family. One large big united family united by the need to find a support system.

The high rise buildings and modern societies have also contributed to the rise of this culture of modern joint family.

Your neighbours are your friends in need. Doubling up as your relatives when manpower is needed during hospitalisation and other regular mundane emergencies

The best part of this system is : we Indians love to be together through thick and thin. And that's how our children will learn sharing and caring. A new type of family values will develop where our children learn to see our friends as family and the children of our friends their siblings from another mother.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Humanity is lost!

We lost ourselves when our quest was overtaken by greed. First, we wanted to learn - the earth, the oceans, the skies and then we wanted to own them. We invented toys of mass pleasure and mass pain. We got religion and creed. And we got lost in all these. We stopped being the wanderers who wanted to cherish nature. Enjoy it's gifts.  We started challenging the almighty the creator. We lost. We are dying as a race. Dying with the burden of civilization that offers only stress and agony of loans. Sitting in one position we are destroying our body the greatest gift of nature. We don't deserve to be called the smartest of all species. We are the most idiotic of all. We are dumb. AI is taking over. We will be lost in machines soon. They are our future. We cease to be us soon. God bless us!

Nature calling!

There is a tiny little compass within us, our conscience, the keeps giving us signals. There are times when it keeps warning us of the dangers of the city life we are living. It gives us hint of being at home when we are in the middle of nature. We are all like tiny parts of the nature we are so foolishly moving away from. And that's why we feel so much at home when we go to these places. We are parts of them - the air, the water, the soil, the fire that makes us us. Not the iphones and fancy toys we are so attached to these days. Let's make it a point to live closer to nature. To breathe pure air. To drink water unadulterated by modernism. To think thoughts that are pure and in tandem with the cosmos. There is a monk within us. Why do we hide him? Why do we not listen to him? We must. Before it's too late!

Humanity you chose wrong!

The caves were dark. Suffocating. But the journey outside the caves has pushed mankind into deeper darkness. It is because we have probably made the wrong choices as a race, together. We are all partners in the crime and the victims too. We should have been driven by 'need' but we chose 'greed' to drive us. The clear skies over our heads , bright sunshine and the twinkling lovely stars, showed us the way to eternity but we chose to hear our own self -doubts. We dulled our insecurities by preying on the weaker species in an attempt to feel powerful. We hid behind our science toys to take on the mighty nature. Look at us now! How miserably failure we have turned out as a race. We have killed the nature with our little experiments and excursions trying to justify as progress... Put you hand on your heart...have we really progressed...other than discovering better toys to keep ourselves mused, have we really achieved anything worthwhile, we the humans? We still can'...