ON THEIR MIND: The consciousness of leaving loved ones behind

Gautam Chatterjee is in a terrible dilemma. It’s 4 pm and classes are out. He is sitting outside the Jadavpur University college canteen with a group of friends, who want to catch a movie at INOX. The show starts at 9:55 and by the time it gets over, he calculates, it’s going to be past midnight. Now, on the one hand he wants to go along with his buddies. But, on the other, alas, he has promised his parents that he’d be back home early.

The thing is, Chatterjee who is not a student of JU but has just dropped into the campus to chill out with friends, has got into Queensland University in Australia and will be leaving in a few months. “So I want to spend some time with my folks at home,” he says. Luckily for him, he doesn’t have to wrack his brains for long. The final verdict is pronounced by his friends. “Don’t be such a drip,” they tell him and without further ado, he pushes off with the gang to the shopping mall on Elgin Road, to kill time before the movie starts.

Gargi Dutt, second-year student of geography at Ashutosh College has been trying hard to avoid tiffs at home, ever since she made up her mind that she’s not ‘hanging around Cal’ after her graduation. “I realise that I won’t be with my folks all the time, so I want to be nice to them,” she says. But what she didn’t bargain for was that being nice entailed going along with the folks to family gatherings. Now, her mother wants her to go along to a cousin’s wedding next week. But she has more important things to do. “I am preparing for my SATs and GREs, and I don’t have time to go visiting relatives,” she complains.

Gautam and Gargi are among today’s youngsters who, determined to carve out their future in greener pastures, seem to be stung by the conscience bug. While they have made up their minds to get out there and make something of themselves, they want to make the most of their ‘time’ with their families before they leave home, they say.

“They are caught in the crossroads,” explains Debashish Ray, consultant psychiatrist with Suraksha Hospital in Salt Lake. “They have grown up in a Westernised world with many Western values. In the West, children are expected to move out after a certain age. Slowly this is becoming a trend amongst educated, urban Indians too. But strong family ties run deep in our culture and the younger generation, bound by these ties, is always, subconsciously aware of its filial duties.”

But the question that arises is, what are they doing about this? Are more and more younger people, at least those leaving home, actually spending more time with their parents than they did earlier? Are these pangs of conscience that they are experiencing merely rhetorical, or are they backed up by some kind of action?

Not really, say experts. “Young people, especially school and college kids, are usually apprehensive about expressing their emotions before others. They fear being taunted by peers for being weak or sentimental. So they don’t necessarily act on these emotions,” says Ray.

So just as Gautam isn’t motivated enough to forgo a night out with the pals, Gargi kicks up a fuss when her mother insists she go along with them for a cousin’s wedding. “She is getting on my case about it,” she says, “and since I think it’s an absurd idea, we end up fighting like crazy. The result is, I feel guilty as ever.”

“And at times,” laughs Gautam, “all this trying-to-be nice business backfires with everyone getting on your case about what you should do while you’re abroad. We live in a joint family, and my cousins have decided to become moral advisors, warning me against falling prey to ‘temptations’. My father has worked himself up into a frenzy over getting the documents ready and whether I’d be able to handle the finances on my own.”

But at least the intentions are noble and “it’s the thought that counts,” smiles Suvra Ray, homemaker, whose son, before leaving for college abroad, had made some, in her words, “comical” attempts to be helpful around the house. “He’d promise me that he’d be back latest by noon from a friend’s house because he wanted to help me do the laundry,” she laughs. “Then he landed up late in the evening looking guilty.”

But Gautam and Gargi too, should be given credit, where it is due. Says Gautam, “My mother has been crying periodically because I will be leaving, and that makes me feel really sad,” he says. “So I try and be with my parents.” It’s one thing, though, that this is limited, perhaps to having a cup of tea with them in the morning. “Under normal circumstances, I would never get up at the crack of dawn to have tea together,” he says. “But now I do it. I won’t get a chance to do so when I’m in college.”

Gargi confesses to having tiffs at home with her sister about trivial things like the remote control and usually ends up monopolising it. But now, she admits that she’s “more civilised with her,” in her own words. “These days, I let her decide what she wants to watch. I don’t want to feel guilty later on.”