| When children grow up and go off to college, the great part of the year the whole family looks forward to is the long summer vacation. For them it is a chance to gorge on home food, see films endlessly courtesy the DVD player and should home be in Bangalore, have a few great dinners at Koshy's and splurge a bit at the Strand book shop's discount sale. For us older folks, it is a chance to get to know them a little more before they are totally on their own and have some really pleasurable long chats at Cafe Coffee Day, agreeing with the proposition that things go better with coffee. |
| As I look back at the end of the summer vacation, I agree all this did happen, in bits and pieces, certainly a bit over weekends, but with one caveat. The last bit of bonding with growing children is all right provided the waking hours of the two parties overlap a little bit at least. As my wife and I discovered, we talked with our children face to face probably as much as we do round the year, cell phone to cell phone, courtesy falling long distance call rates. |
| What we had not foreseen was the extent to which today's grown up youngsters are really midnight's children, not the way I am by virtue of having arrived not long after Nehru spoke about our tryst with destiny, but because their peak period of wakefulness is stacked around midnight. Come the hour of ten or thereabouts, the children are at the computer chatting, in between scraps over who is hogging more of the prime time and breaking the elaborately worked out rationing scheme for the 10 pm to 5 am period. The one who is not at the computer is usually making do with SMS and chat modes on a post-paid parental cell phone, returned with thanks in the morning with everything compromising nicely deleted. |
| Sometimes, when a particular member of the chat group is not to be found, the phone that the broadband service provider puts very helpfully next to the computer connection comes in handy for a quick call to fall in with the rest. In between the fridge is, of course, periodically raided. All this is set against the background of endless music on the sound system which manages to seep through the closed bedroom door. |
| In the mornings, well past your going to work, the different generations are in different time zones, sleep for the younger beginning somewhere around daybreak. The upshot of all this is that the only time you can talk to the children is around dinner which is immediately after you have got back from office, provided of course some friend of the younger generation has not decided to call right between the serving of the sabji and the fish. The late middle age routine of early turn-in and early rise ensures that parents and children are from different planets. |
| If this is the routine then how do they manage to attend classes, I asked my wife. Well, they do attend some classes, she said a bit defensively. We both knew how our daughter had missed a scholarship because her attendance was poor and she lost out on that weightage. We also knew that the great mantra that has carried our son safely through his undergraduate studies is a word which I earlier did not know existed "" condonation, or knowing how to work the college attendance system. |
| What are you so worried about, asked the wife, finding that I continued to look sombre. Don't you see their friends keep the same hours, this is the way with today's youngsters, she added with immaculate logic. But how will they adjust to normal office hours when the time comes, I asked. How did you, she retorted, forgetting that a trainee sub-editor those days came home after night duty at 3 am every other week! |
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
