Family or family functions! What’s more important?

As children, we all loved to wear new clothes, get all dolled up and go to family functions because we got to be on our own, play with new kids and even eat to our heart’s content. We loved to break from the mundane school uniforms, classwork, homework, tuitions and whatnot. We just wanted to skip school for days and be free.

Cut to – adulthood!

We just wish to stay home, sleep all day and do nothing - breaking from the routine work, daily commute, office meetings and whatnot. We are not a generation that despises family. We are a generation that just wants to live a happy life without any drama. As a family, we want our mothers to not worry sick if their sons ate or not. We do not want our fathers to remind us about the bank balance. We know we are spendthrifts. Our saving skills aren’t as elaborate and accurate as theirs. The millennial generation is like that. They just want to spend some time with their family and friends. It doesn’t matter to them how much it would cost. While the entire generation of our parents had it all upside down. They calculated where every penny went and sacrificed their entire life to ensure we got what we wanted. Isn’t that our moral responsibility to return the favour? The question still hangs by the thread.

NO! We are not obligated to return the favour the same way they did - because, the situations then versus now are not at all same. We don’t pay 30 bucks a litre for petrol. We don’t own a 30X40 house that cost 5000 rupees. We are not married at the age of 14. The school fee is not 10,000 a year. YES! Money is what this generation is trying to save but is failing dreadfully. Why not save the time we’ve got left instead? This generation believes in the present and lives at the moment. Is this day going to be memorable? Will I remember this day for years? Will this experience last forever? These questions haunt us more than, who are getting married, what should I wear for the wedding, who all will be present, what shall I get for the bride and groom.

This brings us to the next boiling topic – family or family functions: what’s more important? I don’t even think that this question even needs any answer. Obviously, everyone will choose FAMILY by default. So, why worry about family functions so much? Let’s break the argument down, point by point –

If we don’t attend any family functions then who will attend ours?

Is it really necessary that we need other people to validate our happiness? Or is it really necessary to spend that much of money on making those people happy whom we don’t even know or haven’t even seen our entire life? Let’s look from another perspective. Maybe they are our blood relation; close family rather. We’ve been living next door since before I was born. They have always helped us in our bad times. YES! They are important people. They deserve to be a part of our lives. How many of them would we have? A handful of them whom we can count with fingers? Or do we need a super-computer to calculate the number of relatives related to every single one of them?

Another scenario is where our “family” chooses the prospective relative. They used to be our neighbour. Now they are close friends. More like family. So, they are important. Hence, the neighbour becomes our relative too, and their family too; and their family too, and so on. Our family tree is now bigger than the house that we stay in. So, we rent out a bigger hall to accommodate every single one of them. We couldn’t afford such an expensive hall that big, so we take a loan. Later, we are so stressed physically, emotionally and financially, we are unable to cope up with it all fall sick. So, we have to crack open the fixed deposits to pay the hospital bills and the whole health insurance scheme starts playing with us. DO WE REALLY NEED ALL THIS? If you ask me, I’d rather want my parents to attend my wedding, than me attending their funeral. Do I have to call the relatives then? And start this drama all over again? Let them write about this specifically in their will.

You are anti-social. That’s why you hate family functions.

That might be true. But, if it were true, I’d not have any friends either. I once invited a couple of friends to my home and they all ditched me. Does that make me hate people in general? NO! I just hate family functions where my parents are unable to explain my relationship with them. If I do not understand the relationship in 5 seconds, I do not stay. That’s the attention span of any human being of my generation. While our parents were busy adding more names in the invitation list, they forgot that our opinions mattered. We were, and we will always remain their sweet-little-cupcake child for as long as we live. But, when we begin to form opinions of our own, we are labelled as rebels who do not care about family. Well, we hate to break it to you. All we cared was about family and not family functions. As doctors, the parents were busy treating patients all day, but forgot to treat his children well enough with a kind ‘hello’. As a government servant, the parent had all the time in the world to attend court proceedings, to solve citizens’ issues, and be a decorated officer in the whole department. But, wishing one simple ‘Happy Birthday’ to his son was not as important as sealing a land acquisition deal.

Speaking generally, all parents have made a tremendous amount of sacrifices for us to even be at what stage we are right now. But, that makes us accountable and deeply in debt of our family, not relatives. I owe all that I am to my parents, not to my relatives. If I am supposed to honour my parents, I’ll do it so the way I feel. It’s again, not the parent’s choice to make it for me by forcing me to attend family functions. It is as simple as offering prayers. God will never ask us to face the North, bow down to North-East, stretch one hand to South and the other towards West. Though religion is yet another debatable topic which we always avoid during family conversations, family functions are on another level of crazy. Being anti-social is not the issue primarily. Being allergic to bullshit is the actual reason why most of us despise such gatherings. Lock us in a room with people our age; we won’t have problems talking to each other because we have all gone through similar bullshit at some point in life. Though many relatives claim to be cool and more intelligent than us, they do not seem very convincing when it comes to understanding us. For instance, one of my relative talks to me about valuing relationships, respecting elders, being kind and all that elderly jazz. But, when it comes to his own family, it is totally ripped. His sons don’t respect him because he’s a foul-mouth. He doesn’t respect anyone’s privacy. He doesn’t value other’s time, and overall, he is lazy as fuck. Does that justify me being anti-social? NO! Because not everyone is like him. But, do I look like I care about everyone? I just wish my parents can understand the person I’ve become rather than being ignorant about what’s happening in my life. I hate family functions because no matter where you go, whom you meet, everyone has the same question. When are you giving us the good news? NEVER! I say in my mind and smile and walk out of the conversation. Why is that every single relative in my family function list is worried about how soon am I making my wife pregnant? How and when did this become a global issue? I so much feel like saying, “As soon as I am done attending your funeral.” That’d be fun.

Your wife should also know our side of the family. Send her over if you can’t come.

I don’t know my side of the family yet, and I do not intend to know either. 600 people at my wedding and I do not know half of them. Who are they? Where did they come from? Who invited them? Who’s paying for all that food? It was my parents who decided the invitation list. They paid for it. We just stood there smiling at everyone till our jaws hurt. We stood starving on the stage while those whom we didn’t even know, were gorging on the food that we didn’t even get to remember the taste.

Cut to – 2 years later.

My wife has given up the job search because she took the time to adjust with my side of the family. She’s a housewife now, looking after the house – a bigger job than mine, I admit. But, does that count as she’s jobless and idle? Does it mean she is sitting like a statue in front of her phone, waiting for someone from my family to call and invite her to some family function? Well, I did not marry a cat. She might not be at work professionally, but personally, she puts her blood and sweat to make my messy home look like a home that welcomes families, and not the mosquitoes. She should know our side of the family? My parents have been married for more than 35 years now and my mother still struggles to recognize my father’s side of family members. Looking at the magnitude of my (father’s) family size, nobody would even dare to call themselves strangers. As I said earlier, I love and respect my family. But, I cannot say that about my relatives. If my family wants me and my wife to force love on those whom we don’t even know, we will always fall short of their hopes. Ours is a pretty simple generation that wants relationships to be as real as possible. If this reality cannot be accepted by parents, then expecting more from us is futile. I’ve never forced any decisions on my wife and neither has she. If she feels like flaunting her new dress and jewellery, or meeting new people, or going to new places, she is always free to do that. But, how often does one get to marry, right? Family functions are not UN Council meetings that it needs a representative from every state, every country and every home.

To all those obsessed with being the centre of the universe, the world is changing. Karma has its way of catching up and resetting the world. Some legendary ideologies may stay to create a league of extraordinary family members (I may be dreaming about this, but why not?) and some might fade away into the oblivion. We all are still part of our family. WE ARE FAMILY. But, are we functioning well as family? Food for thought!