Dad does matter !!!

Of Course he does. How else could you explain Rahul Gandhi being hailed as the new PM. Talking of credentials he doesn’t have many apart from his famous surname and the fact that all of a sudden, when UP assembly elections were just a month away, he remembered of the poor UP junta and how they needed a messiah in the form a blue blooded, foreign educated, Page3 neta flaunting a firang girlfriend.

To be fair to him, he is not alone in the list of scions building upon what their dads did and using it in every conceivable way – socially, economically, politically and even emotionally (“Had Rajeev Gandhi been alive, such and such thing would not have happened !!!”). You have 10+2 kids high on booze from their dad’s pocket, racing in their dad’s cars and crushing people all around, some wannabe Sanjiv Nandas (of the BMW crush and run fame) these. You have sons high on the dad’s political clout and goonda power killing people for refusing them drinks after bar timings are over.

Get deeper and you’ll find that the roots probably lie in us Indians basically being an insecure lot. Right from the ancient age, whoever amongst us made big in whichever field wanted to secure that “big-ness” for his generations to come. The early Brahmins, since they became big in education ordained that only their kids can study, similarly the early Rajputs wielding political power ordained that only their blood can be kings. Privileged or underprivileged at birth is quite inseparable from our psyche. It’s evident equally ferociously even today. In medical profession, quite a few things are quite easy if you are a doc’s kid. It is said that even in army, if you come from an officer’s family, things are different for you.

Nowhere does this philosophy of “privileged (or underprivileged) at birth” comes to display more strongly than during admissions in Delhi schools. If you are a common man on the street working hard for your family and don’t have political or bureaucratic connections, God help your kid even if he has brains of an Einstein.

Looked objectively, dad’s economic and power position affects the kids in every society – including what school you go to, what company you keep and what attitude you develop. Just that, in our country, walls are more rigid, your dad’s name can help you much much more than it can in other countries and unlike in the US for example, there are other roads to money and power apart from smartness and hard work. Thus while you pay for your dad’s not being exceptionally brilliant, smart and ambitious, you may also have to pay for his not being an unscrupulous, dishonest cheat.

On the other hand, if one person in the family tree makes it big either through hard work, diligence and smartness or through cheating, robbing and swindling, he can rest assured that his generations to come will not have to worry, unless of course some of them turn out to be absolute morons and go about killing their sister’s suspected boyfriends or snorting too much cocaine on the eve of their dad’s Asthi Visarjan (Remember the Majahan dude ???).

Moreover, in an interesting twist, nature arranges for its own poetic justice. Several of the big daddy’s sons and daughters have landed themselves in soups too deep for even their omnipotent dads to bail them out. This is usually the case with the “short-cut rich” dads who forget to instill basic qualities in their kids. The wheel does move after all.

The point is not to underline the unfairness of it all. Life everywhere is unfair. The smaller point is that the degree of unfairness in India is much more. The larger point is that no amount of unfairness, big daddys, political and economical clout has ever been able to stop small dads’ kids with stars in their eyes and fire in their bellies. Examples are everywhere: Dhirubhai Ambani, Prez Abdul Kalam, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Gulshan Kumar et al. Guess the fire is extra intense if you dad is small.

Ah, didn’t I say, dad does matter, after all.