Growing up before the advent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp definitely had its perks. For one, dinner was always had at the table with the family. It was predominantly my mother, my father, my sister and myself, though my paternal grandparents, my aunts, uncles and multitudes of cousins made guest appearances. What used to be interesting, irrespective of the number of people at the table, were the dinner time conversations.
My parents were doctors and my sister was into genetics. She was a total English grammar Nazi. I flitted from thinking I knew everything to realising there was a whole lot about a whole lot that I didn’t know. Those days, politics was one topic that always provided fodder for a heated debate. My mother was more towards capitalism while my father was an ‘Agmark’ socialist. My first introduction to capitalism and socialism was through my sister. She explained that our school exams were like capitalism; you have books and study for an exam, you get good marks. You don’t study, you fail. Nobody was going to give you marks for just attending an exam. Socialism, she said, was like our family dinner. You got dinner irrespective of whether you helped make it or not or even contributed to the conversation or not. You simply got food for being there at the table.
My parents agreed that was a fairly accurate description of two very complex concepts and then started the debate. To this day, I stand by the belief that I learnt more from that dinner table than I would have done taking a college course in political science. I would later read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and a whole lot of other books, only because of that dinner.
Now, I try to get my own family together for dinner every day and we try and discuss a whole range of topics that we may or may not be qualified to even talk about. One day at dinner, my 9-year-old son noticed all the messages on WhatsApp and asked what it was all about. So, history repeated itself and my 13-year-old daughter tried to explain capitalism vs socialism to my son as I watched on proudly. My husband and I finally asked my kids which they thought was better. They almost reflexively suggested a middle ground. Too bad our leaders aren’t as perceptive!
Sindhura Radhakrishnan
Email: sindy.radha@gmail.com