May 17, 2012
It is simply great being a woman because that’s how one gets to be a mother, wife, daughter and sister, not in that order but essentially in my order of preferences.
I am at that crucial stage of life when I do not know if I am young, old, or in between! Novels and newspapers are painful to read without glasses. I remember the lazy summer holidays when I read all the novels I wanted slouching anyhow. I cannot do so anymore because my glasses will fall off if I slouch!
The labels on medicine bottles are difficult to read even with glasses sometimes, so my husband has devised a remedy. He brings out a magnifying lens “meant to read small print” according to him. I am suitably horrified. As a child I used to try and burn a newspaper saying we were “starting a fire!” with these lenses during the summer holidays, and succeeded more than once. It sure feels queer to peak into labels with a magnifying lens. Yet, as you get used to it, you begin to see the benefits of doing so, thanks to the man of the house.
On a serious note, what are the responsibilities we shoulder? Parenting is a multitasking skill that changes constantly with every new day. Our mothers simply scolded us when they did not approve of what we intended to do. Yet today we need the skills of making our child know of our disapproval with diplomacy after they have done what you would not even dream of doing! A senior at work in jest used to say that I had son-stroke because of my constant worrying about him. Yet I remember distinctly that we reported all our activities faithfully to our parents, especially to our mother.
Cases of suicides for reasons sillier than can be comprehended abound, one is constantly afraid of putting forward the wrong foot. Intel’s Andrew Grove spoke about the strategic inflection point that businesses faced wherein strategies that a business successfully worked on for thirty years or more did not work anymore thanks to the changes in the business environment. Similarly, one had readymade answers with due precedents from what our parents did for most situations we faced with our children, but those solutions do not work anymore.
Still, how important is the role of a mother in one’s life? A student of mine, on two different occasions had said to me that I resembled his mother since she also was a working lady like me. On one tragic Sunday a month and a half ago she passed away in a road accident. I have often spoken in class about the need to consider and understand the difficulties a mother undergoes, the amount of physical strain that she endures, to my students. Yet today I am tongue tied about this issue in class because that child is watching me in anticipation of what he had already heard about mothers towards the end of the class. I try to speak to him and wonder what kind of words of consolation one can offer to someone who has lost a mother whom he ferried to and from to her office everyday on his way to class.
There are youngsters who have dealt with losing their mothers to chronic ailments like cancer. The experience has sadly stayed with them for long periods of time. One wonders whether the agony of watching one parent waste away slowly can ever be wiped from memory, more so the mother because she is the one who does the nurturing.
Another issue modern children face is the additional responsibility of looking after parents when they are unwell. Single child or two children families have put additional burden of household activities on the children. There are those who are forced to attend court due to legal battles in the families that requires their time that should be spent on attending classes. Attendance in the class is an issue that needs to be handled tactfully. Does this fact need motherly understanding? Perhaps, but not to the extent of sacrificing mandatory studies and attendance.
There are paradoxes as well because I have seen aged parents living all by themselves in their homes, sometimes large bungalows where perhaps they had anticipated that the rooms of the house would be filled with the laughter of their grandchildren. I cannot have an opinion about this, but I would like to put it this way.
Trees in Bangalore and surroundings have been felled mercilessly in the name of development, the carnage is still on. Someone said that it should have been done ten years ago and some sentimental fool had kept it at bay for so long. Development is definitely necessary. Only good infrastructure, like broad roads that keep traffic jams at abeyance are one such phenomenon that attract foreign investment in our cities, the competition between cities being thoroughly intense about where the multinationals prefer to base themselves. Governments compete to bring in the multinationals as well as the jobs. The next election requires due numbers, we are all tech savvy and knowledge wanting voters gathering information. Yet it is not all wrong, bringing in jobs to the country or the state is a noble gesture, but there can be solutions for these problems without compromising on forsaking tree shelters that many times are more than a hundred years old, especially in cities like Bangalore and elsewhere. I am reminded of the risk-return tradeoff and the utilitarian concept we teach in the MBA classes.
In my line of career, chances of forgetting your name are great because one is either a “Mam” or a “Mom”. The line between the two is very thin as in an a or an o! Sometimes counseling is also called upon. Modern day problems are so different and varied that it calls upon all one’s resources, knowledge base, prayers and tact to think of solutions. The day time MBAs’ age ranges between 21 to 24-27 and the evening MBA classes have students who are sometimes older than yours truly. A particular class told me that I could consider taking up counseling as an alternative career! My humble endeavor has always been to keep families together and help people see things from a third person’s perspective, a bird’s eye view that many times helps greatly. So, Mam many times becomes Mom, I guess.
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