Of relations and more…

This is a personal blog of my lessons learnt of being in a joint family and the relations revolving around it..

In life, for this generation, the concept of joint family is something that they ll learn from social studies books. Full generations of people have been living independently and independence is something that we have enjoyed. Now when I tell my story, it is bound to be from my viewpoint and my dear readers can interpret in the way they wish to.

Living in joint family for us meant primarily obeying what elders in the family said. This obeying would mean that we are completely submissive to their whims and fancies and the way they used to treat me or my parents would be something more of “I am the king, you are my subject, listen to me”. Now my Dad being the youngest son of my grandparents, and my grandfather being a busy person could only convey to his youngest son, “Listen to your brothers, and do as they tell you”. The brothers looked after him really well, took care of his needs and made him a rich person by allowing him to join the business. He is successful today in terms of the wealth he created, but today sadly we feel we are a “subject” to some king, in this case my dad’s brothers. Now when I look back, I realize the importance of the Civil Disobedience movement initiated by Mahatma Gandhi. Disobedience so that we could be free in this world.  

Lesson One: Obeying is good, not in always. In a family, everyone has or should have the right to speak up, and they should do so at an early age.

Business of the family and family business are two separate things in life. While my dad was involved in a successful business that he used to run with his elder brothers, many a times his relationship with his brothers was purely business like, so was the approach from the other side. Some were the brothers lost their plot and any relationship that existed was purely business. But inside the family the cousins were and are the best of the buddies and the camaraderie that exists between the cousins is good. This should continue. Relations should not be made because of common goals alone of continuing in business. This is wrong. The 3 brothers made a mistake of losing their identity of being brothers and selfishness and ego’s crept in and business got affected. But thanks to some good efforts from the children (cousins), the family ties continue to be strong as steel.

Lesson Two: Relations between families and blood relatives is pure, it’s not to be contaminated with money, selfishness and ego’s. We should strive for it.

We have respect for to our teachers, our bosses, our parents. In my observance there are two types of respects. Passive & Active Respect. Passive respect comes from ones position that one holds. For example we have respect for our teachers. But the respect continues after we long leave school and college, this is earned respect or active respect. In family too, these respects exists. As I was saying in the beginning, obeying would not necessarily mean, giving respect. That is passive respect. The situation in my family today is that, a person elder to you would mean, every one should show him respect. While he himself should come down and earn others respect. This is not happening in my family and am sure this situation is there in many families too. A simple incidence comes to my mind. Recently a common function was being hosted in the family, which was long before planned for which my parents were invited for early morning function just the previous night at 10 pm.  Respecting individualities and giving value to the other person would make things far better.  

Lesson Three: Give respect, take respect.  

In my family people take each other for granted. All this again comes from the supremacy factor. Recently I had an argument with one of my cousins. He started a chat with me to tell me that he was “angry” because I dint call him on one occasion, while forgetting that I had called him many times on ISD too. Well just because I called him, it does not mean that I was expecting his call. This is what we do with our relations, we take people for granted.

Lesson Four: Never take people for granted. In a joint family this factor exists and we need to remove this, because everyday all the people are not the same.

Love, love unconditionally, love without expectations. Sadly this is not there in my family. I have no idea, but all I can say is that, I love all of you, which makes me write this. If not today, am sure my future will be better with this realization.