It was my final year of school. Exams were near. Its results would determine a lot about our future. Maybe some students cared a lot ; I was naive enough to care a lot less! Always romanticizing my life with my head a bit in clouds! Trusting fate and fantasy rather than facts! Which is a polite way of saying I was clearly an idiot. I still am not exactly the sharpest tool in the box! Of course I have paid heavily for my idiocy in my life. If only I had applied myself better on time..... Regrets; regrets; that is what life gets reduced to towards the end! Makes one understand why the final end of what you never ever wanted to end; seems such a relief! 'Regret' is what all of it distills down to!
Anyway , our school sort of prided itself for a large number of students that passed out with distinction. My bad luck that day was my English teacher Bhatia sir boasting in the staff room during lunch break. " Ashutosh is brilliant; I am sure he will pass with distinction"! Lal sir, my math teacher was livid; "That boy, absolutely no way ! he just does not work. I will be surprised if he just passes!" An argument followed and Lal sir, being the mathematician he was, decided to prove his theorem. unfortunately it was his class right after the lunch break!
I was alright with algebra and rather good with geometry. It was the reason I passed the subject. Lal sir however stormed into the class and straight away asked me to come up to the board. He wrote down a differential calculus problem and handed me the chalk! "Solve it", he thundered. My heart sank as calculus was my Achilles heel. I bravely started but got stuck after the third operation and despite a lot of prompting by my class mates - failed! Lal sir was ecstatic, I told Bhatia sir; I told Bhatia sir !"
Next day Bhatia sir gave me a long lecture about time management and how I should dedicate more hours to practising math. He was wrong in the sense that he thought I am good with English because I work hard at it and I am not good with math because I do not practice enough! Fact was, those days I never worked hard at anything, period! I had to really work my butt off later in life because I could not be bothered to do so in time! The exam results proved both of my teachers right! While I was the top scorer of English among all the schools in our district; I passed the math exam by the skin of my teeth! If I remember correctly I got 47/100. It is a good thing that the minimum passing marks were a mere 33/100.
It was a different era. I did not attend one of those top private schools in our city. No Modern school for me; no DPS; no St. Columbus; not even Ramjas school! Our family could only afford a government neighbourhood school for me. Somewhere I could walk to. The school fee was 15 paisa / month as opposed to those upmarket schools which I remember were about Rs. 25/month, equal to 2500 paisa. My father's entire monthly income was about Rs 125 after rent and taxes ! It however is quite fair to say that I did not receive a bad education at all. Teachers cared a lot, students were treated as family. I remember getting invited to a teacher's own wedding. As with most other things in life, money had very little to do with it, if at all.
Slowly money started gaining importance and it has now become the measure of all things. Love , respect, ethics , morals, right ; wrong .... all are measured with money as a scale. There is a funny story - maybe not so funny! I had just landed my first job in Canada at a design company called Expographiq. It was based in Quebec and I was part of a small team in the Toronto office. Anyway one day I saw my Vice President Fred Fox cleaning the office wash room. I was surprised but held my council. Later I checked and found that the toilet door has a list with all the six / seven names of people that worked there, including mine. They also had a day of the week in front of their names. I was a little sneaky but found from the office secretary that it is the duty roster to clean the toilet ! What the @#%% !
I had never even seen that list and it was right by the entry door. Till that moment I had never cleaned a toilet in my life! Company wanted to save the little money needed to hire a cleaning service so we had to do it ourselves. Nobody else thought much of it; except me and I kept my mouth shut! That I thought was another way of thinking of your staff as your family. Of course, I can clean and unclog toilets now! I do most of the cutting and chopping in the house. I cook from time to time and regularly do the dishes after dinner every day. All of this was unthinkable in families only a few years ago!
Who is part of your family? What does a family even mean? It all became clearer to me a little later ; in Walmart of all the places on earth. As I told you I am quite a romanticizing, crazy idiot! I still feel a person I would gladly have taken a bullet for, as my family; even though they were the one's that held the gun to my head! This person only exists in my memory too! What world do I live in ? Do not follow my example!
Anyway, I was in Walmart to buy an ice box. You mostly use it during picnics to carry drinks. It's lid can be reversed to make a table. That table has a place for 4 drinks. I asked the Walmart guy and he told me I could get a bigger box but the lid would still have four indentations. That they have determined is the usual number of the picnic party. A family of four !
In my childhood, picnic meant hiring a big boat. Getting all the children together and sometimes their friends too. Invariably there always were a couple of last minute guests. Often times guest of the guests were also invited. Everybody was welcome as the long as the boat could safely hold them. A party of twenty was the norm. Four people; just four...... seriously!
Home I grew up in had an eight chair dining table. It was rarely used! We always ate together; we always had guests & the total number always was more than 8. So we sat down like a family on a carpet around a plastic sheet and ate! Picnic every day! young me resented it quite a bit those days. Today I see how valuable, innocent, kind, generous and pure those moments were!
Russell Peters is a world famous stand up comic. His net worth is close to a billion dollars. His home is not too far from us. He mostly lives in the US; his aged but lively mom Maureen lives there by herself. Their next door neighbour are our family friends. Each time we go to their house Maureen is there. She is treated just like any senior respected family member traditionally gets treated in an Indian home. With love, & constant care! There are significant social, cultural, religious and economic disparities there. Maureen is not even remotely related to the Misri family. Is she their family? Absolutely yes ! It always warms my heart to see her! Their love and care for each other restores your faith in humanity!
You do not have to be related or even live in the same house to be a ' family'! Your hearts need to be on the same frequency though! Otherwise like everybody else I too have experienced family members who are not 'family'! Several of them....my bad karma certainly!
That reminds me when I went to buy a dining table at IKEA. Most designs were.... you guessed it! You can get a six person table too. There are fewer choices but the real trouble starts when you try for an eight seat kind. Things start getting rare. Any bigger and they start calling them banquet tables! Not dining tables anymore. Seriously! I anyway needed a four seater so I was fine. There are several table designs for two and the sales trends show them to be a very popular choice.
Family as we know is getting smaller and smaller. Your parents are a different family. Your siblings are not part of yours. Of course your adult children have to look after their own family! Rings a bell! doesn't it ? Family is quietly getting reduced to two and I suspect trending towards one. You are becoming your own family! Selfish, money minded materialism has done this to us! We have destroyed the most cherished achievement of the human society - family!
A table for one ? Can there be such a thing? How would you go about designing that?
