3 Lessons of Life I Learned From My Father

Your first teacher always happens to be your parents. While mother takes the route of inspirational stories and soft techniques, father goes the real life experience way and we all know that those lessons set the direction and speed of our life. Every child is unique and unique are their characteristics and behaviors. So, a benchmark or comparison does not help much; rather it hurts the prospects more. I am not a parent, so, I am definitely not the right person to dole out any advice on parenting, but there are lots of things which I learnt from my father, which proved to be very useful in my professional life; though those were not meant to be a professional advice from my father. Since I was an talkative, arrogant kind of child who use to be more busy in doing multiple things in one go rather than focusing on one and was very short on one thing, which is ‘attention’, my father had his tough task cut out for him. Though never realized then, but any other person would have changed the color of my skin, because the kind of boy I was. I would be better if put those things in a listed form and what I learned from then:

1)      Every individual has weakness; harness that weakness: As I mentioned, I was an arrogant and talkative boy with short span of attention.   This enraged my eldest cousin once so much that he slapped me very hard and left a clear mark on his hand on my face. My father never did that; he in fact, did something complete opposite. Today’s kids have lots of electronic devices to spread their attention on, but we had only two things, i.e, play or comics. Since time of playing outside in the field was fixed, so, comics were the option available most of the time at home. My father carefully pulled out all ‘Hindi’ comics from my cupboard and slipped ‘English’ comics there. Since ‘Hindi’ is my mother tongue, so, there was not much effort required to learn it, but ‘English’ was a very important language of communication and required special effort to learn.

I was allowed to bring those comics on study table and read it along with my class room texts after every major break in my concentration. So, it became normal thing for me to read my class room texts for ten minutes and comics for five minutes alternatively and consecutively. He started inserting comics with my school texts in beginning, then sports pages of newspapers, Agatha Christie novels and by the time I finished my 10^th grade, I was reading Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, which I hated the most. This strategy of my father was derided by many of his colleagues and relatives, but he continued applying that on me. Apart from that, whenever he saw me ignoring studies for a longer period of time, he use to hurt my ego by saying, “ you won’t be able to do it”, “this is beyond your capacity” etc. Knowing very well what my reaction would be , and it were like “how do you know that this is beyond my capacity or I won’t be able to do it”, he used to respond with simple answers like “do you think that the time you are spending with books is enough to cover the whole book”. None of these things were told to me in high decibel but message got delivered at the right place. Every examination used to prove him right and I was always among top 5 students of the class. I was never a hard working kind of person, so, he knew that pressing me to put hard work may yield something else and may not be the right for me and so for him. He had the easier option which my cousin used on me, but he never did that. He never asked me to leave the habit of reading, but kept tweaking it in accordance of the need. He never really reprimanded me for being arrogant, but used it to push me to work extra hard. I was talkative and he made me talk at every possible platform possible. In short, what could have been a complete no-no for a middle class parent in very small town of Bihar, he made it a complete yes-yes and harnessed all my negatives for my benefit.

2)      What freedom can do, restrictions can’t: My father was always friendly with all my friends. He used to spend chatting with them about their interests other than studies for hours. My friend used to think that my father is just superb man and it used to make me proud also. I don’t know whether he liked doing so or not, but by doing so, he knew my limits and boundary. So, whenever anybody came with complains about me to my father, and believe me, there were many, he was able distinguish between right and wrong without even talking to me. Though he didn’t let me go unpunished for my mistakes, but he never responded to the perceptions others had about me. Sometime my mother used to get worried about me but my father always calmed her down with advice to not to hold me back, let me make my mistakes and learn. He made me sit with him when I was around 15-16 year of age and made me understand the finances of the family. After that, I managed the household expenditure with my mother; of course the money was of my father only. Initially my mother asked me about the details of expenditure, but my father stopped her from doing so. He told her, “if you start asking for the details of every penny, then he will start manipulating and hiding it; just keep a watch on his behavior and you will get to know where he is spending that money”. Though I had all my father’s earning to spend and I did spent some of that on my friends, but I never picked up any bad habit, which could have embarrassed my parents.   In the bargain, I learned what to expect from father in terms of money, how hard he is working to earn that money and I must respect that.

3)      If you want to make someone understand your idea; go and talk to him/her: My father broke many stereotype prevailing around twenty five years ago about fatherhood in our society. Fathers were being used as a tool to scare the naughty child, they were not supposed to interact much with their children beyond providing them for their need and asking them about their school performances. Completely against this thesis, he used to make me sit with him and watch TV, talk about movies, film stars, different social issues etc. It became a practice of our house to sit for a cup of tea (yes, tea replaced milk when I grew up to be teenager.) after my father’s coming back from office and share what did during the day. After dinner, we used to take up different issues for the sake of intellectual discussion. I didn’t realize earlier that I have picked up his traits unknowingly, though he never forced anything on me. He just talked to me about what he thinks on different issues in the open discussions we used to have in the morning, evening and after dinner. My father had the habit of reading anything and everything he could lay his hand on. On weekends, he used to read same news in three different newspapers and that also from beginning to end. He had the habit of writing stories. He was friendly and understanding with me. He was very democratic in decision making and always encouraged healthy discussion. I have all of these habits now, he never made me think like this; he just talked out to me.