wtf

My granddad used to grow the best paddy in his village. He used to rear 6 different types of farm birds apart from cows, buffaloes, oxen, ram and maintaining a fish farm. His cotton got the best rate among the surrounding villages. He had 2 younger brothers and they all lived together for 25 years. The brothers were something the village boasted of!!

My other granddad's name alone carried an influence that no signature on notary paper could. His command over the quality of paddy and its processing made the village's landlord make him his mill's supervisor for a fixed salary and a %age of profits every month. Performance based bonus in its time !! He was the one whom people in extended families looked up to in any emergency / calamity. Such was the respect that he commanded.

The first granddad got addicted to gambling at the time when he had 4 growing girl children. Addicted to an extent that he wouldn't return home for days and nights on end and some elder from the family had to go and get him back. And he would only disappear the next day. Needless to say all that he had built over the years wasted away. The second granddad was a man of freedom. He wanted to do a business of his own and took up to truck business. One truck brought him good luck and he prospered. But this was a business that he did not have a knack of, given his farming background. The second truck that he bought cut him down to struggling to meet a day's end.

That my dad and mom picked up their threads from there and made it to where we are today is a story for another day. Despite the fact that one grandfather isn't there today and another can hardly go around, the way people treat me when i return to their villages (my true roots ?) amazes me. They were real men. And no man is ever perfect. That their lives were monetarily a zero sum game is another matter. I am not making up reasons for bucks that we do not have today. These people left a legacy where they came from. 20 years from now, go to the place where you came from and try inquiring about yourself and you will understand what i am talking. No one will even know you existed. That is what we are right now.

Wealth can be built up or destroyed and it takes of fair amount of luck to go eitherways. But fame is a different ball game. For the future generations, we will just be parents or grandparents; not role models. That unfortunately will be taken over by film heroes or virtual heroes - advanced customized cartoon characters. If we get wealthy, they will have money to boast of. If not they have to live without the luxuries that rich dad's kids can afford. What tradition do we have to pass on ? What heritage do we have to hand them over ? All the technological advances and complex code practices apart, Can we narrate a simple bed-time story to a kid today ? At some point in our life, all of us would definitely have felt that our parents could have done certain things better in bringing us up. But do we really have it in us to raise our kids atleast the way we were brought up ?

I guess that is one question every generation of parents face. And the relation with parents will always revolve around a ignorant they-just-don't-know to an admiring how-did-they-do-it cycle. It amuses me how every damn discovery or invention from a pin to a gun is meant to improve the quality of human life and every one of us grow up thinking how golden the days were in our childhood. What hollow lives are we leading ? do we really work because we love our job ? Does the dream job ever exist ? If it does, how long will the fantasy last? If i am proved wrong personally by an inexplicable hand of fate, probably i will have to eat my words. But that is a risk i am willing to take writing this post today.

Are we giving back anything to the society that we came from ? Deep down, every one of us bastards is a philanthropist. But no, we will not start by deed. For us life is not try -> fail ->try -> fail-> try->succeed. We wait for the perfect job, the perfect home and the perfect life partner to somehow magically fall in place. We are incurable optimists in the most hopeless of times. We find people, places and even horoscopes to blame but never ourselves. We teach our dogs to pee on the roads and blame the government for not cleaning it up. ok, that last one was something personal. But dont every one of us have an unwarranted grudge against something or someone that is beyond our hands ? Why the F*** are we messing ourselves up so badly and are in so mad a hurry to do so ? Why the F*** are we so unwilling to simply stop, admit and make lives, ours and others so much better.

Unbelievable though it may sound, I have no Russian or Chinese influence and thereby am no Socialist, Communist, Leftist or Naxalite. I am a Capitalist with a capital C and live by the policy that it is not love but bulls and bears that make the world go round.

Questions, questions and questions. Answers; time alone can provide. Hopefully.