F.A.M.I.L.Y.

Why do we merely inherit identity? Why are the lot of us born under someone else's authority considered rather lucky? A lot more questions answered:

F.A.M.I.L.Y: Why Do You Do What You Do?

Genesis – often to two unsuspecting individuals. Survival – rare fortune extended by those two individuals.

Somehow the needs of a species at large is communicated and made to deceive the likes of individual subjects probably by means of a strange meddling in the 0’s and 1’s of its double helixes to create the Robin Hood of the mammalian genome – a masochistic brew – called love. Each of us is born against the logic of individual instinct. We are born of a person who chokes to let us breathe. Why do such sacrifices not go against the universal ‘Natural Selection’ process of the parent? Is it about the Greater Good?

We grow in a unit of community called ‘Family’. Where we have ‘Relatives’ – we did not pick – often people with dissimilar interests, aspirations, expectations and each with their own set of rights. Rights over us. Responsibilities and duties, to carry on the ‘Family Tradition’. What are these traditions? Why are they made to seem so important? Why are we made to play in a team? But more importantly why are my ‘team-members’ so biased in my favor? Why do they care about the choices I make? Is it biologically etched on to them? And why does my old-man have an influencing (often commanding) say in my life?

These aren’t teenaged retorts thrown ‘in your face’ with a ‘Why’ to begin with, a ‘?’ at the hind and gibberish in between. These questions pick at one of the most incomprehensible connections – those of feelings, fatherhood and family. Those which make us seem ‘human’ in sociological sense. I could forever ask and wonder what difference it makes to ‘them’ whether I wear a black ‘Slayer’ tee to an indifferent social gathering and not grim formals, or why they hopefully make an effort get rid of overgrown hair on somebody else’s (mine) head and face.

The bitch mother of a new litter is notorious for betraying her ‘ladylike feminism’ and going tooth and nail at the unfortunately close passer-by – straying close to her pups, that is. What is so superlatively desirable about those shaggy pups that have already caused pain and displeasure to her? Why the possessiveness? Who or what instills this element of protective parenthood to the extent that a docile creature suddenly turns vicious, and why? Do we the children earn our appeal by the trouble we cause to merely create and ‘own’? And is that earned worth enough to last us a lifetime of care and concern?

They say that ‘by the time a son begins to understand his father, he has a son who doesn’t quite understand him’. Well, in a larger sense, aren’t we all sons who don’t seem to understand our Father?

~ Abhinav Nayar