by Parth Pandya
Parenting, I believe, is the toughest job in the world. There is no manual that has the five right steps to raising a perfect child, there is no training in the world that can prepare you for it, you don’t know if you have succeeded or not until years into the effort, and while you might start with the aspiration of raising the perfect child, you will come to realise soon that the bar is impossible to meet. If you manage to raise the child to be an improved version of yourself, you can call it a success and call it a day. No wonder they say it takes a village to bring up a child. Anyone who has managed a project of any respectable magnitude will tell you that two people substituting for many, is an ordinary management choice. To add to the mix, if you were to change the environment in which you perform your duties to be far removed from your familiar surroundings, you are left with a tough problem to solve and limited means to execute. Welcome to the world of the “IBCP” (Indian Born Confused Parent).
The IBCP is not to be confused with the ICBM – the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, though both are similar in their efforts to hit their targets in one continent while sitting in another. The IBCP is the lesser-known front to the phenomenon known as the ABCD, or the American Born Confused Desi. ABCD refers to the rather unfortunate prospect that a child born in the U.S. (though I would assume the theory can be extended to other first world countries as well) faces – that of being born in a country not of their parents’ origin and being someone who can be termed as neither here nor there; not fully Indian like their parents and not fully American in the stars and stripes mould. However, the more I look, the more convinced I am that it is not the offspring, but the ones who sprung life upon them who have confusion reigning in their heads.
My son is three-and-a-half years old. I have taught him the three important facts about India that he needs to know by now. One, Sachin Tendulkar is God. Two, there is no better playback singer than Mohammad Rafi, and three, Lord Rama was a “good listener” to his parents. Beyond that, all knowledge of India that he gets from me is information with no reality to juxtapose against. It might be Kazakhstan, for all he cares. It is only the occasional trip he has made to India, or the fact that our social circle around us is primarily Indian, or the occasional Indian event in the place we live, which sets some familiarity for him. How much of India can you thrust on a child who sees anything but India around him most part of his day? Language education (Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil… take your pick) can’t substitute for the English he hears all day at school. If Hindi cinema is the high point of Indian culture you are trying to proselytize your child with, God help you. The moment he or she moves out of the comfort of your home to daycares and schools, the child is on the path to being as American as apple pie. Most IBCPs try their best to ensure that there is some sheera served along with it. That is the primary clash of cultures – the American culture is foreign to the IBCP and the Indian culture is foreign to the ABCD. The only difference is that while the ABCD can lead his entire life in blissful ignorance of the land of his or her forefathers, the IBCP is suspended like Trishanku – neither here nor there. Neither Rihanna nor Rehana. Neither Terminator nor Turbanator.
One of the more common gripes you’ll hear from Indians who have settled for a while abroad and go back to visit India is the cost of everything. This stems from the fact that in their vision, India has had 0% inflation in a decade or so. The same philosophy dangerously applies to the manner in which they perceive how kids are raised in India. Children growing up in India are being brought up with American products and American culture in a way that their parents might never have been. From Dora to Thomas, Pokemon to Transformers, chances are that the Indian kid is more in sync with the American landscape than the IBCP has imagined. While he sits and drives his kid to yet another birthday party that is more perfunctory than celebratory, the IBCP imagines that the kids in India are spending their innocent childhood like he once had – watching harmless programs on Indian TV and dedicating their evenings to free play in the building compounds. Trying to bring your kids up with that comparison in mind will never succeed in a world where parents, be it overseas or in India, are essentially their kids’ Private Secretary. You spend your energies trying to set up play dates and driving them around from one class to another. What many IBCPs also don’t realise is that life in metropolitan India these days, is not the way they imagine it is – carefree and innocent. If anything, all accounts I hear seem to indicate that they have it worse – preparing kids for interviews to the kindergarten class hardly seems to be carefree.
Of course, there are some IBCPs who aren’t confused about one thing – their intent to stay. They fully embrace the truth that the life they strived for can’t be replicated in India and for better or for worse, they are here to stay. Their philosophy is simple – if you can’t be an ideal Indian, be an ideal Indian-American. Go win the spelling bee. Darn it, can’t spell? Go win the geography bee. There are enough bees in the bonnet for the kid to succeed in. Chess, swimming, tennis, debate, ballet – no enterprise would be unconquered. And of course, you had better top the class. You can come second, as long as the first is another Indian or perhaps our competitors from the North. By that, I mean China, not Canada. Amy Chua would have been proud – the answer to the Tiger Mom is the Peacock Mom. It is easy to lose perspective in uncertain surroundings, so you apply the same hyper-competitive juices that others have successfully done before you to their projects – I mean, children.
All said and done, the IBCP cannot be blamed entirely for what they go through. Every generation feels suspended in the middle. Our parents straddled the Indian middle class values through a stagnant growth phase of a newly independent country and must feel that they lost out on the boom that came in the form of the economy opening up. The IBCP of this generation must feel suspended in the middle – succeeding in crossing boundaries that their parents never could, but stuck in a foreign land with a foreign culture and kids to rear in them. One wonders what the ABCD generation’s suspension point will be. Mixing the two cultures is a tricky job. Your kids will be removed from you as you are from your parents. The generation gap isn’t vastly different just because you are in a different country.
How do you communicate the meaning of “Indian culture” or “middle-class values” to your children? Explaining what it meant to go through hardships for getting the basic amenities? Emphasizing that family comes above all else, even though you may not get on very well with them at all times? Respect for elders? Tolerance? Patience? None of this can be cited through examples to a child who rarely sees any elders other than his parents or gets to spend an entire summer at a cousin’s place away from his parents or can’t necessarily see the kind of financial hardship that would prevent him or her from getting what they need. The surroundings they are brought up in are very different form the ones their parents went through while growing up. This is the essence of the IBCP’s struggle – how does one find that middle ground, that neutral language that puts words to their feelings and values that can be made relevant to their offspring? Leave aside the trace of irony when you teach your child “jhanda ooncha rahe hamara”. Somewhere down the line, you might be singing “God Bless America” yourself. Just don’t confuse the lyrics when you do!
Parth Pandya is a passionate Tendulkar fan, diligent minion of the ‘evil empire’, persistent writer at http://parthp.blogspot.com, self-confessed Hindi movie geek, avid quizzer, awesome husband (for lack of a humbler adjective) and a thrilled father of two. He grew up in Mumbai and spent the last eleven years really growing up in the U.S. and is always looking to brighten up his day through good coffee and great puns.
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I appreciate the content of the article and how IBCP feel.We did have harder lives .Our children are more priveliged.But what our children watch everyday is how both the parents contribute to all the chores and functions of the middle class home here and manage it as a family and team.Kids here also start helping at a younger age too and are more independent.
Take the best from both worlds ! thank you for the article..good read.
Nice post. I personally feel that the sooner IBCPs accept that they cannot shoehorn their kids to be ripe with Indian culture, the better. A dose of India now and then is fine, but the moment parents begin to fret every time the kid crosses the so-called Indian standard, it’s downhill from there. As you put it, the kids are gonna do it anyway.