Attached bathrooms, detached families

Attached bathrooms, detached families would be the ideal way to describe the emerging trend of family system in India.

Everybody wants to stay in their own shell and nobody has the patience to wait and tolerate one’s own family members. Privacy is more important and the good old intimacy is being done away with.

 Leave alone sharing bathrooms, we can’t view even television together. More and more houses have multiple television sets. Everybody is couched safely in their comfort zone and communication between family members is usually the mandatory pleasantries.

There is no need to write an obituary for the Joint Family system in India because it is long dead. The pity today is that even the nuclear families are not jointed.

It is not uncommon in certain households when grown-up children don’t come to the drawing room, when parents are at home. People have started living as individuals and not as a family. The freezers in our heart are more powerful than those in our fridges. We have lost the heart to excuse family member’s shortcomings however intimate the relationship maybe. We have powerful vacuum cleaners but they can’t clean the clogs in our relationships. Everybody wants to win with their egos but everybody is losing their lives

Today the hectic work schedules and school timings mean multiple keys to the same house. Going by the ever increasing extra marital affairs, it seems that even our hearts have started having multiple keys.

We have come up with the wonderful concept of open kitchens but usually the most worked device is the microwave ovens to fill the stomachs of couples who are working in different time zones. Family dining halls have become fashionable but hardly the family gets together to enjoy the environs. Our bed rooms may have air conditioners but our hearts are seething with anger. The bed room may have romantic colors but not the life lead in it. The beds have become broader it seems only for the couples to find their own corners in times of a dispute.

How happy are those homes which still fight over a bathroom?
How happy are those homes which have less to eat but a lot to share?
 How happy are those homes when people come to open doors and forgotten fights?
How happy are those homes somebody is there to feed the kid when he/she comes back from school?
How happy are those rooms where there are more people than bedrooms?
How happy are those rooms where still the fight goes on for a single remote?
 Let us do everything to share, care, fight, forget, eat and enjoy with our families. We let slip the wonderful joint family system, let the nuclear families not go the American way.
Let no kid die in her room, with parents not being able to hear her.
Let us pledge to uphold the great Indian Family.
Let us undo the great saying” Money is their god and how to make it is their religion”.

Scrap that term “quality time” our families need both quality and quantity time to ensure that it survives