As a middle class Indian child in the 80s and 90s in India without the economic boom and those days where people drank coffee only at home and not in some fancy cafe, your parents make you believe the world is a real tough place. Strangely they also do have very high expectations of you due to some irrational sparks of genius they might have seen in you as an infant. Here are what they expect of you(this list is not completely mine and my friend Kaushic also contributed to it…some of it may not have been even expected of me since my parents gave up on me early)

  1. Holidays are for studying: Unfortunately when I was a kid, people had not started taking the term “Holidays” or “Vacation” seriously. School did not help either in because in its infinite wisdom used to put a test just after the holidays. The school i went to had thursdays and sundays off. Till I was 16, thursdays and sunday mornings were for mugging up history and geography. I got so disgusted studying “revolt of 1857″ or “Vasco da gama” or how “There was a great bathhouse in Indus Valley” that my history marks always touched 40s. Later when I grew older these only two days off transformed into dreadful dark moments of mugging up organic chemistry. Unfortunately our parents never realized that these 2 days in the week are for having fun. Well then there was the added horror of holiday homework (350 sums) for sumer holidays attempting to turn us into einsteins and the horrible essays trying to describe your trip.
  2. Misery….good….fun ….bad!!: Somehow in the struggle to struggle against other struggling students , fun (which is the essence of childhood and happiness) is frowned upon as a really bad thing. Parents like the matrix make us believe “Fun is for later when you are established in life”. So basically when you are 35 (average age an Indian parents believe that their son is established), your have started balding, you have a drinking problem and you have a nagging wife with a credit card and a kid who seems he wont even make it to secondary school, you are supposed to “have fun”. I actually believed (after the intense brainwashing) the more miserable I am , the more successful Ill become. This is made worse by stories of the guy next door getting up at 4 am to study everyday. I mean which over achieving dick gets up at 4 even before the crows to study “The Human Digestive System” or “Soil Erosion”.
  3. Life is one bootcamp after the other: Remember the first time you were dragged into a drawing class with a drawing book bigger than you. That started it all and did not stop for the next 16 years when your parents realized you will never be Picasso. But these traumatic 16 yrs are filled with drawing class, singing class, violin lessons, guitar lessons , cricket lessons and the very traumatic swimming lessons where you are in a toxic pool with 200 other kids(30% of whom are puking or peeing discreetly into the water). If they only realized that their kid is only become the standard guy like their father whose only occasional exercise is picking up the remote control and complaining about carpal tunnel syndrome they can might as well relieve us from the torture we go through.
  4. Life is about becoming an Engineer and then getting an MBA degree: I was made to believe that I was most suited to be an engineer. So was 60 million kids in my generation who knew that engineering is the only way to a respectable life your parents can be proud of. My parents still think I should have studied computer science worked in tcs and had a safe and secure life(aka feel like takign a gun and shooting myself as I redundantly do the job as a database “watever”). MBA degree even leads to a greater glory and that when your dad even comes and says “Im proud of you.” The problem is out of the 60 million indian kids in my generation there are possible 10 thousand seats in respectable places and the rest just die trying.
  5. Be asexual till you get engaged: Having a normal sexual urge before you are engaged is a crime and having urges when you are teenager is punishable by death. Same as all the fun goes, we are expected to have “fun” only when we are established. A man kinda reaches his sexual peak when he is 15 years old but they expect you to wait for at least 12 yrs more when you get married to a woman who will only have sex with you on alternate saturdays . And flirting is only approved after youa re engaged.
  6. Be friendly to a shit load of relatives: Consequence of our bloody high birth rate is that we have tons of relatives and there is some lame ass cousin getting married to some unfortunate girl and thus a terrible wedding to go to. You cant go to a wedding and be yourself(specially me) cos you will let down the entire family if you eat too much, talk too much ,breathe too much or do any bloody thing you do everyday. Then there will be this huge huge crowd of old people you dont even know and who wont even rememebr you. I have aunts goin “so your in class 12 now is it??”.