BEING SMALL TOWN PARENTS...

Last week I visited one of my friend’s home who has joined an MBA institute in Pune about a fortnight back. I could sense that his parents were missing him badly already. His mother summed up her feelings when she said,”khana banane ki icha hi nahi hoti?” My friend’s sister got married in January and now his parents are alone at home.

One of my other friend could only manage a little smile when his mother posed him a very simple question, “can’t you find a suitable job of your field here itself?’ The very painful thought that their children are going to leave their homes for their career is in the mind of many parents; only few though are able to express their feelings. Which parent would like to become a hindrance in the career of his or her children?

Glamorous jobs with fat packages always belonged to metros and other big cities. Although smaller cities and towns are creating more jobs than before but for the professions like engineering, management and accountancy, metropolitans are the ultimate destinations. A surge in our economy has created a lot more job opportunities in these fields and so the employable work force is being looked for, beyond the cities in the smaller towns and cities. As a result, small town youth is getting more opportunities to go into these fields and they are moving towards big cities like never before.

But is it a new phenomenon? Not really. This has been going on since independence. People used to move out of their towns and villages to bigger cities in hope to make it big there. Many of them aspired to become big business man. Others just wanted to get suitable employment and earn money. But the whole scenario was different then, economically as well as socially. First of all, that period belonged to joint families. Many times the migration to the big cities was more an inner urge to do something beyond convention rather than the need. If they didn’t succeed in their endeavor, they would return to their homes, to their families.

But today, in the present era of nuclear families living on the concept of ‘hum do hamare do’, this migration has a lot more effect on the social life than ever. If a family consists of two children, a boy and a girl then the things become more complicated when the girl is married off and the son goes to big cities for job hunt. It results in a creation of void for the parents. More often the job scenario is such that it takes a person around 4-5 years before he attains some stability. By that time he often has to wander from one city to another city due to the job. After that only he can ask his parents to come and stay with him. In few cases parents too don’t want to leave the place where they have lived for so long, the place they know and where they have relatives and friends.

Let’s talk about girls now. Though parents are more forward now, they still hesitate in sending their daughters alone to big cities far away. A sense of insecurity coupled with a certain reservations in their minds leads to forbidding their girls to pursue their dream jobs. More often than not they end up as lecturers in colleges or are married off. They don’t get much opportunity to plan their careers their way. But are the parents really to be blamed? I don’t think so. It is really very difficult to imagine what is going on in your parents’ mind until you yourself become one.

As I was writing this post, I came to know about the ahemadabad blasts. The first thought that came into my mind was about the increasing woes of the small town parents. As the terrorism is becoming a part of day to day life of the people of metros, the small town parents too would have to learn to live in this manner. As my friend commented after the bangluru blasts, "the most difficult thing for me when I will leave my home will be to make a promise to return soon. "