FIFTH COLUMN

The Family

By C K Lal

With individuals as components, associations can be formed. They support and sustain their members as rational persons. But individuality is not just rationality, and a person is an emotional being too. Human beings need a support system that not only acts, but feels and thinks too. They need a natural system like a family to meet all their needs.

Family must have been the first institution to be invented. It may have gone through minor variations over the generations, its composition may have changed slightly, its functions may have fluctuated, but its basic form continues to be the same. A family is still the fundamental unit of a society.

Family does have its critics, perhaps the most vocal of them being the Marxists. For them, family is an institution invented to perpetuate individual poverty rights. One would have agreed to this proposition readily, but for the fact that family ties are no less strong in even the really destitute. Religious, social and economic conditioning may have played their roles in forming such a reality, but that again reinforces the extent of importance of the family.

Feminists are the other influential critics, and fortunately, we don’t have many of them in our society. According to some of these femi-nazis, families strengthen paternal control over society and underplay the role of women in it. A very creative figment of imagination, one must say. A family can not come into existence in the absence of  very strong women. A house can never be a home unless there is a woman in it, whatever individualists may say about personal freedom. It’s the mother who makes a home what it is.

Family performs several physical, economic, social, cultural and emotional functions. It’s an incubation tube, a fertilization field, an educational institution, a playground, a work-place, a leisure and pleasure house, and finally a temple, all rolled into one. At every stage, there are women in it —as grand-mother, mother, wife and daughters. The central figure of them all is almost always the mother. The coincidence of celebrating Mothers’ Day a day prior to the World Family Day of the Fifteenth of May is not without some inherent significance.

Sadly, Chairperson of the company that publishers this newspaper was mourning the passing away of his mother on this World Family day. I remember her as a kindly and gracious lady straddling over the Chaudhary household like the high-priestess of a temple, her deities being all her family members. In this hour of their grief, there is little we can do except show our solidarity. May Lord Pashupatinath give them the strength to bear his irreparable loss and may the departed soul rest in internal peace.

Families do get transformed once in a while, but they do survive and thrive all over again. Heartfelt condolences, Basant.