Payback

I was re-reading Maximum City and came across a para that was very perceptive.

It’s an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For eighteen years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won’t buy her new sari, and your sister will stay at home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the age of eighteen, you have your worshipful family’s expectations behind you. You dare not turn around. You have been witness to all the petty humiliations they have suffered to get you to this place. You now need to deliver. Your sister is married, your mother is sick, and your father will retire next year. You carry a heavy burden of guilt for having heedlessly taken the best of everything. So when you go out with your matriculation certificate or your BA and find there are no jobs – you look for other ways of making money.

You will look for other ways of assuring your family that their investment wasn’t lost. You can take beatings, you can take rejection, but you can’t face your family if you don’t do your duty as a son. Go out in the morning and come back at night, or go out at night and come back in the daytime if you have to, but take care of the family. You owe it to them; it is your dharma.