‘Everywhere the same slogans about a better future, and everywhere photos of children who smile, run about and play. Alas, our human future is not childhood but old age. The true humanism of society is revealed through its attitude toward old age. But old age, the only future that each of us faces, will never be shown on any propaganda posters. Neither on the left, nor on the right..' - Milan Kundera
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The year is 2009. It is 5.30 in the evening; I am walking around the dingy lanes of Calcutta’s College Street doing research for a book. In this eastern sector of India the sun sets rather fast and I notice that the lights are just coming on, in different corners of the city like little fireflies, appearing as if from nowhere. I buy a ‘bhad’ (earthen pot) of tea and relax my back on the wall of a temporary book stall.
I am meeting a friend of mine at a café for some chit chat. Am quite looking forward to it, as the friend in question is about to be married and we have a lot of things to plan about the marriage. To my surprise, my friend looks a bundle of nerves when she turns up for her date. The reason I am told in due course is that she is about to meet her would be mother-in law for dinner tonight.
A few years ago, I was working in an organization, where there were a lot of female colleagues mostly much elder to me. One day during lunch I was asked by one of them why I wasn’t wearing the traditional Bengali red and white bangles, being a married woman.
About some ten years ago, a relative of mine (he would be my grandfather- Mother’s Uncle), a British citizen in his 60 s, came down to India and expressed to my mother his wish to get married. Needless to say this caused quite a furore in the family, mostly amongst distant relatives for whom this seemed to be one big joke.
India is a land where a parents are more often than not revered and worshipped next to the Gods.The country also has a happy tradition where, children look after their parents when they are old and parents doing the same for their children well after they are past the age of a legitimate adult. But is the relation between a parent and a child always as hunky dory? Has the parent-child relation also undergone changes with times?
The maid is being given instructions on the lunch menu, the evening dinner plans already afoot.The maid is chided about why she has been irregular. There is a familiar scream from the kitchen as the maid arrives near the bedroom and screeches out her lungs at Indu, who is reading the Sunday papers, with coffee in bed.
Have you heard of an instrument called ‘Lovometre’, a gadget that measures love between couples? If you are sad and surprised that you haven’t..don’t be, cause neither have I!
