Inspiration

Ok! This post is just to reply to a comment/question on my earlier post- did I always have these thoughts from the day I left India? The answer is No. I stumbled upon this thought and I must admit the inspiration, or rather the incident that inspired me to do this, has bothered me till date.

It was sometime a couple of years ago that I happened to visit two families on the same day- and the differences between them blew my mind away!

These were friends of my family and I knew nothing about them before I visited. I agree sometimes things are not quite how they appear to be but I am big believer of intuition and vibes.

The first family I visited, and I will call them happy-family, was just that- happy! They had a nice house and looked like they had visitors quite often. We had lots of laughs and I was really impressed by the fact that their son had decided to pursue an internship in India with an Indian company. Their dad-a first gen migrant- had a business that took him and his wife to India almost half of each year. Their other son when on phone with his friend sounded American but spoke with his parents in their mother tongue-Hindi. Just a very happy family!

The other house I visited, I had terrible vibes. The whole house screamed sadness. This first generation migrant couple were disappointed in life in general. They spoke of their son and daughter, who had moved out of the house and rarely visited them. In fact, we did overhear the gentleman speak with his son, in English, persuading to come home for dinner-just for the day!
They recounted their India visit experiences and all of them were bad, in general! The woman was sad that rarely anybody visits them these days. I was almost in tears when I left their place! Felt sorry for this couple, who probably feel quite lonely in the country they have decided to call home, and at the same time, dislike the country they used to call home!

This day left a profound impression on my mind- I surely thought of 20 years down the road, what couple will we be?

I want us to be the happy-family and dread to be the sad-family! So, I started thinking about what could have been the things they did, choices they made, decisions they took, that got them to where they were today... I also agree that life circumstances are different but yet, if I could extract a few guidelines on how to be happy as a first-generation migrant, that would be great!

We had with us somebody who had met these two couples almost two decades ago and had known them closely then. This somebody pointed out 3 major differences in the mindsets of the two families back then-when they were young and their kids were little. I will not reveal what the differences were in this post for a specific reason.

This incident and these differences form the basis of my inspiration and also act as the hypotheses for my investigation. Read on....