Home alone
V. Rajagopalan
Mythili sleeps with her phone by her side on Saturday and Sunday, anxiously awaiting a call from her son and daughter settled in the United States. A conversation with them over weekends is the only source of succour for her. If, for some reason, the call does not materialise she gets agitated. She turns to her husband for consolation. The week rolls by with Mythili praying for the welfare of her children.
Whenever she cooks a special dish, she recalls the days when her children were around and savoured what she prepared for them with affection. Today, she and her husband, both aged, are left to fend for themselves. Even during sickness, they care for each other with Mythili often hesitant to pass on her worry to him. As she bides time, overcome by pangs of loneliness, she is beginning to wish that her son and daughter will come back to India. She longs for their support and attention in the winter of her life. She is not alone. Many aged men and women are undergoing a similar plight, suffering in silence.
Many parents, in their eagerness to see their sons and daughters earn attractive salaries, encourage them to seek jobs in foreign countries. They sow the seed of ambition in the minds of the children from a young age and urge them to aim for a job abroad. As a result, there is hardly any middle class family which does not have children employed abroad.
While seeing off their children at the airport, parents feel proud. After a few years, the young men and women get accustomed to the western lifestyle. It is but obvious for them to opt for the land that offers them a better life. Mythili and her ilk should, therefore, stop lamenting.
In the past, places of employment were restricted. There were many children and even if two or three children left their native place, parents did not worry. But today, we find that single-child families are becoming the norm and parents are forced to live alone. And if they do not hear from their children during the weekends, their sense of loneliness increases. They seek company to talk and spend their time. They expect somebody to attend to them.
The proliferation of old-age homes is indeed an off-shoot of the sense of longing, particularly among the elders whose children are settled abroad.
Who is to blame — the children, parents or both? Ambitious parents want their children to go abroad and earn substantially. Their desire is fuelled by the fact that their neighbours' children, living in the U.S., earn in dollars. It does not occur to them that once young boys and girls taste a comfortable lifestyle, they will not give it up.
Their own making
Their loneliness in old age, therefore, is of their own making. It is the result of their ambition-driven parenting. They would do well to remember that once children go abroad, they adapt themselves to western culture where parents and children live apart, and the young are not expected to provide any support to their parents. Let the elders in India, then, learn to live by themselves. It is the price they pay for the welfare of their children who have only fulfilled their life-long wish.
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