There is a lot of talk about family values nowadays. It's a buzzword with Conservative politicians around the world. Bush was elected on this as an issue, Margaret Thatcher was nuts about it. But growing up in a Hindu family I never really understood what the pressing concern was.

I grew up in a big family. My family has always been structured like that of the Godfather's - well minus the crime element. My father is the head of the family, and while my mother and all their brothers and sisters would be consulted on all important family matters, the final decision lay with him. My grandparents conceived my father, their first of six children, rather late into their marriage. As such they were quite old by the time they had the other children and though it didn't really stop them from actually having them, the responsibility of bringing them up (and also looking after my grandparents) effectively fell on my father and his immediate youngest brother (who unfortunately died in a accident slightly before I was born; they say I look and sound like him). And growing up I saw my father executing that responsibility very efficiently; providing their education, arranging for their marriage and it becoming obvious why he was to head the family. My mother, second in a line of eight children also had a similar story.

In my generation, I was the first born of the family, born at a time when most of my aunties and uncles were still teenagers. As such I was looked after more by them than by my parents. My second uncle on my dad's side would put me to sleep at night (and also in the afternoon), the third uncle on mum's side and second aunty of dad's side had feeding duties, the first aunty on dad's side and the fourth uncle from mum's side were the teachers and so on so forth. My parents normally had to get in line, usually after my grandparents (who were even older now), to get an audience with me. It was great. I was a child celebrity.

But as I grew up and started going to school and interacting with other kids, I became increasingly uncomfortable with my familial situation. My fellow classmates would tell tales of all sorts of wonderful programs and cartoons they saw on TV. But every time I tried to watch anything, I'd get kicked off the TV by someone or the other and told to go do my homework. On stressing that I've already done it, I'd be told to go take a nap. There was no compromise when it came to the only TV in house. Only thing I could do was to ask to go to my friend house to play, but then I'd be told why I needed to go outside when I had so many 'friends' in the house itself.

Many of my classmates had working parents who were normally away from the house. So once they got past the annoying nanny, those guys would enjoy the kind of freedom that me and Braveheart could only dream of. They were the masters of their respective House Realms, whereas I was a pauper who always had to share his room with someone. I especially envied my friends whose parents were divorced. Their parents would compete for their love - by buying them all sorts of magical toys and goodies and taking them on adventures to wonderful places. Only magical place my dad took me to was his work. Man I hated that. The mind numbing boredom I had to endure while watching him read files and type thing onto a typewriter (remember those?).

And the lack of privacy in the house was ever more of problem when I was a teenager. We had an open door policy, which meant that no doors inside the house were to be shut in the daytime. I could never dare to call a friend over, in the morbid fear that I'd be made to eat my embarrassment though the nose. Having a bazillion other people sharing my room and life with, I could never find a room in the house to hang out. Not to mention the interrogation that anyone visiting the house with me would have to go through.

As such I decided to move out as soon as I got into university. However 'moving out' wasn't something that you could do just because you wanted to live alone. There had to be a valid reason for spending additional money on another house when there was a perfectly good one available, like I got a job in another country or I am getting married - in another country or I'm joining the army - of another country. So I tried to create a reason. By coming home late from the university every night and saying that I've been studying hard in the library (though it closed at eight and I never actually stepped my foot in there) and then making out as if this back and forth movement between uni and home was tiring me out. So eventually the plan succeeded and I managed to move out. Though unbeknownst to family, the new place was actually further from my university than the family home.

I had to get a job to pay for the rent. My family was already paying a huge amount for my fees, not to mention other expenses around such a big household. I hated the job, it was minimum wage, the managers were complete assholes, it was tiring. But it mattered not. I was FREE. I didn't even mind that my land-lord was semi-psychotic and possibly a serial-killer, that the water in the bathroom was either frostbite cold or boiling hot, that the heating was on for only an hour during the coldest of the winter, that the window in the room didn't have a lock and had to be tied with a rope from the inside, that the house was in the ass-end of the world, so far indeed from university that this time it really was tiring or even that in spite of all the privacy concerns I was yet again having to share the room with someone but this time for economic reasons (come to think about, it has always been the same reason). But I was free - at least in principle in that I answered to no one (except to the routine phone calls from home).

In the beginning I went back home only during special occasions like Holi, Rakhi, Diwali etc., when I had no other choice. I'd normally be too busy being a student. No not studying - going out, taking in the culture, that kind of stuff. But after a while that all started to become routine. It wasn't so much that real university work, the one which gets you a degree, actually started to pile up, that most of the friends also got too busy with the same work to spare time, that I realized you can only go beer and McDonalds for so long before you start to miss home cooked meal or that clean clothes had fast become a rarity. It was more so, and I never thought I'd say this, that the aloneness (NOT loneliness) was starting to get to me. I started to miss the conversations with dad about the UN's ineffectiveness, those with mum and aunty while they were doing the dishes after dinner, helping my sister with her homework (shit, was she even doing her homework while I was away?), watching over priced crap pay as you go movies on sky with my cousins, playing (losing) chess against my uncles. Oh and all that stuff that I didn't care about before DID eventually start to get on my nerves. Man my landlord was a weirdo! I never knew if he was knocking on my door for the rent that was late or to chop me up and sell me in his shop (apparently he was a butcher)

Soon I found myself going home every couple of weeks, which became once a week and then twice and before I knew it was thrice and four times. My cousin commented that I hung out with her more after I left home than before. But I couldn't ASK to come back home, not after all those excuses I'd made for leaving. But when my father mentioned that since I was travelling quite frequently from home and it seemed like waste to spend money on rent for the other house, I was happy to accept his logic.

So there I was - there and back again. It's been a few years since then. Some of my uncles have gotten married, some have had children, some have them on the way. My mum and dad had to leave the country on account of my dad's job. So things are a little confusing without the head of the family to guide it. But with the help of the Gods and long distance phone calls, the family gets by and weathers the storms. My mother's younger sister who is effectively the eldest and lives across the road, counsels the family when necessary. The other night, I was at my friend's house, when I got a call from my aunty (who had become my aunty by marrying my youngest uncle). Apparently they had a fight over some irrelevant issue and now he wouldn't open the bedroom door for her. Initially it may have been silly, but after a while of her knocking and asking to open the door, she got worried and called me (Me! I was important). I came around immediately to find her crying in the living room and immediately shouted at my uncle to open the door. Embarrassed when he heard me, he opened the door and claimed he'd fallen in deep sleep and couldn't hear anything. Yeah right! Later my older aunty also came by and, not literally but more or less, slapped the hell out him. The point of the story was that although my uncle was acting like a moron, the rest of his family was there to take care of my newly wed aunty and she didn't feel isolated. If the family hadn't been there, they probably would have gone to bed in separate rooms and been pissed of at each other for several days, and this could have made a crack in their marriage that could have gotten bigger over time. Now it was a just minor domestic scuffles that couple generally have and next morning things were back to normal.

CLICK HERE TO COMMENT / DISCUSS