The Nuclear Rush

My taya (father's elder brother) was a big man, the Chairman of a top Indian PSU (which, incidentally, our Government is trying to monetize, read 'sell', today). He has tons of money, social standing and prestige, some faithful and many not-so-faithful, sycophantic followers and whatnot. Around 45 years back, my taya had this obnoxious habit of tweaking my teeny, tiny ears when I was five or six, cooing sweet little nothings and calling me his 'kanna' (love, in Tamil). I hated it.

I miss it now, though I haven't seen him for over three-and-a-half decades. That's because my father passed on and the rich uncle tried to grab our home to become richer. Despite those memories, I miss him and those days — our jaunts to the Malay Mandir in Delhi's RK Puram-Vasant Vihar every Sunday and our family lunches thereafter. I waited for these Sundays, because I would get to eat oranges and apples that my taya would bring, which we could not afford then.

Similarly and surreptitiously missing are my cousins, aunts, uncles, chachas, chachis, tais and fufas. A few of them have now gone to a better place, while those kicking around still on this Earth are racing to McDonald's, Subways and malls in their swanky cars with their 'very own' families. Times, sadly, have changed. Why did this happen? How did my Sunday Malay Mandir visits get snatched away? In India and around the world, we are a broken lot today as extended families, torn apart and running on empty, mostly at the altar of material things. Times have changed, quite dramatically.

Is this good or bad?

A dangerous word

What I have witnessed in my own lifetime tells me that nuclear is a dangerous word today when we propound it to families, worldwide. Indians and other global idiots are blissfully shunning extended families, their forefathers and their lineage. Somehow, big houses, bigger cars, ACs and material things are what we yearn for. Thus it is that I have decided that I hate nuclear — for me, at least, it took away people that I grew up with. I have seen my city and country's family system disintegrate as more and more become programmed to live and love only their very own. The sad part is that we have allowed this to happen — supposed independence and chosen segregation.

What triggered this chain of thought? It was just an innocuous exchange that I heard on the television last week that jolted me and touched a chord. The said TV programme ended with a poem by a girl who talked about distant relatives that she grew up with, relatives who would regularly congregate at her place, or she at theirs. The elders would discuss familial matters, neighbors, politics, food and the weather, while raucous youngsters, siblings and cousins would titter away for hours, playing, loiter around or just mess about.

In the said poem, the girl speaks of lost relatives and the fast-evaporating family adhesive in society, superseded and cast aside by superficial things that money buys. She also talks about lost relatives that don't have money anymore to buy things. India and the world have broken apart, it seems.

A worldwide trend

I did some research. There are pluses and minuses to adopting a nuclear-family structure. Everyone experiences problems and emergencies, ones that life throws our way, perhaps to test our backbone and vigour. The nuclear family is not a clinical option. Because immediate family members provide a strong bonding experience, a study in the United States by 'Preserve Articles' claims. A smaller family allows increased attention towards partners and children. However, the analysis also points out that a nuclear family unit isolates people from relatives and relationships.

This breakdown of an extended family unit is anything but beneficial, especially in hard times. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins have always had a unique place within a family structure, especially in India, providing support and guidance when most needed, but a nuclear family does not deign to foster these relationships.

'Acts International' goes a mite further. It says family members have a tendency to burn out from attempts to meet individual needs. The focus on children is overwhelming and leaves little or no room for parents to take care of themselves. Without help from an extended family, parents need to take time off work to care for children when they are unwell or emotionally needy. This struggle to balance work, family and friendships without outside assistance leads to stress, depression, anxiety and other problems.

Children are the key

The Concordia University, St. Paul, has a peculiar explanation. It says a nuclear family is child-centric, the focus is on the immediate family, children… The family survives only to satisfy its own needs. Everyone else, regardless of bloodline, is next (or never) in line. This leads children to pursue selfish tendencies and think long and hard before even politely acknowledging anyone who is beyond their immediate safe zone. Thus, uncles, aunts and distant siblings are off-limits, and only the three-four-five group is their own 'private space'.

Nuclear families typically include a mother, father and children living in the household. However, as the societal landscape changes, so do ideas and perceptions of family types. Thus, every unique personal structure has advantages and disadvantages. I scrounged the Internet on this subject and found that almost 70 per cent of today's growing children live in a nuclear family unit. Most adults see this structure as an ideal or dominant arrangement to raise a family, having decided that two parents and their children provide a favourable setting and image, financially and for immediate personal comfort and well-being.

Nuclear families provide consistency — good child-bearing, neighbourly behavior and economic positivity. The nuclear family eats dinner together, goes to a temple, mosque, church, synagogue or what have you, has vacations and strengthens relationships, building a solid foundation for life's future goals.

But there are negatives, and terrible ones at that.

Tough times are tougher

This then is a story of our times, the story of the older family, once a dense cluster of siblings and extended kin, now fragmenting into ever smaller and fragile forms. Initially, the result of our fragmentation into a nuclear family structure didn't seem too bad an idea — but as the nuclear family structure is more brittle and ductile than extended ones, further fragmentation has happened. 'Fragmentation' has been used too many times in one paragraph, so here goes. Nuclear families are oft-flagellating into single-parent families, and chaos and turmoil are resulting. We read about them in newspapers and on the Internet, with the number of divorce cases in India at an all-time high each month.

The world seems to have chosen to make life freer for individuals, yet it has become unstable for families. It has moved from interconnected and extended families — which helped protect the vulnerable from any of life's shocks — to now detached systems. This shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families has visibly led to a familial system that liberates the rich while ravaging the working-class and poor.

Also, any emergency situation such as an accident or serious illness can land a small and nuclear family in a serious crisis. Having grown up in an extended family, I can tell you that we had a built-in button for these scenarios. Relatives would rush in and offer support, emotional, financial and otherwise. But in a nuclear family set-up, where both parents work and have young children, the ability to meet expectations and needs solely within the unit is not always feasible.

The old and the ageing

What about the old and the ageing, because the nuclear family system is the roughest on them? Today, in India and around the world, we have a peculiar situation. We have a rapidly growing number of youth and young who are stoutly fending for themselves, braving it alone in the harsh new world. But we also have our old and ageing

suffering in their golden years, alone. It is a brutal scheme of things, as these following statistics will tell you.

The famous temple town of Vemulawada in Telangana is getting known for the wrong reasons — family members are leaving behind the aged in the temple premises. Not interested in looking after the old and mentally­-challenged, families are washing their hands off them and leaving them on the road outside the temple. Many other elderly people are walking to the temple themselves. In Indore, we recently saw heart-wrenching visuals of frail, old men and women being dumped outside the city limits of Swachh Indore. The elderly were struggling to get back into the truck as it nonchalantly drove away.

In Karnataka, families are abandoning their own by the dozens. Ironically, it is transgender NGOs that are jumping in with the rescue act. A non-profit organization called Nammane Summane has jumped in to take care of the abandoned. In Punjab and Haryana, things are gorier, especially in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Domestic violence cases against senior citizens have increased, so much so that the elderly are being turned out of their homes, abandoned outside old-age homes, even thrown into pits because they just won't die.

This is worse than a bullet or a nuclear bomb, which kill instantly. Come my time, I would prefer to be surrounded by my beta, beti, bhatija, saala and saalis, missus and any lucky surviving elderly ones — not rot away to my final passing on my own.

The writer is a communications consultant and a clinical analyst. narayanrajeev2006@gmail.com Views expressed are personal