Disconnection

Is it just me, or is there a general disconnect between people my age and their parents?

There is no doubt that I’ve learnt a lot of things from them, and a lot of moral values and behavioural patterns have rubbed off on me. But when one looks at the differences and variations, it’s hard to believe how much of a disconnect there can be between people living under the same roof.

For starters, me and my brother are almost always in our room, where our computer, guitar and other personal stuff lies. My parents are always in the drawing room, watching television. Meaningless, mind-numbling television. Cookery shows featuring dishes that are never going to be cooked in my kitchen for the rest of the future of mankind. Travel shows featuring places that no one of us will ever visit or ever desire to visit. Marathi soaps that feature the most arcane plots and simplistic characters to reaffirm the viewers’ existing beliefs and ideologies and faith in the great, infallible middle-class moral system. If there’s something I really hate about my evenings at home, it’s the thought of sitting in the same room as the television and watching television with my parents. I shudder at the thought of my parents watching this kind of television. And yet I can’t do anything about it, because I’ve come to accept that given the social conditions and environment they were brought up in, that’s precisely what they’d want to do on lazy afternoons and free evenings.

In general, my parents have no clue what’s going on in my academic, social, personal or professional life. They more or less have a clue, but no details are ever shared. I’d like to say that there has never been an environment conducive to a free sharing of ideas and narration of the day’s events in our drawing room. This has led to tragically funny situations, including a time when my father didn’t know whether I was studying advertising or journalism in my media course. They have never had a clue, and still don’t, about the upheavals, however minor, my life has gone through in the past four years. They harbour, I strongly feel, a misunderstanding of my opinions, beliefs, tastes, character and personality, and this misunderstanding along with the lack of efforts to destroy it, is a major reason for the disconnect.

For example, yesterday night my mother called up a colleague of hers whose twenty-something son studies Indian classical music – he plays the tabla – and requested her to ask him to come teach me to play the tabla at my house. Today out of the blue, I’m supposed to call up this boy and not only display interest in learning the tabla, but also fix up timings and fee structures with him. To top it, she doesn’t know the guy’s name. She doesn’t even know that my college starts in 5 days and that there is no question of starting a music tutorial right now. Oh, and please note: I DON’T WANT TO LEARN THE TABLA in the first place.

All these things – not just these seemingly trivial examples, but more important things in the same vein – reaffirm my faith in the belief that in any relationship, a careful understanding and respectful tolerance of the context and ideology of the ‘Other’ person, is the only way to keep the relationship open and strong and warm. I, for one, would definitely be more open and more “connected” to my daughter (or son, for the sake of gender equality). One of the tasks of parenthood should be the constant attempt to dissolve the notorious “generation gap” – which is actually the reason for the disconnect that got me ranting on this topic in the first place.