Life Lessons from Father to Daughter
In the last few days, I have come across advertisements, sales, discounts, and offers in the media and markets for the upcoming Father’s Day on June 18th. Companies have gone to great lengths to promote their sales through innovative and emotional ideas using the Father’s Day theme as the backdrop. Also, I know many of my friends and relatives who have plans to celebrate it with full gusto.
In India, the celebration of Father’s Day is a fairly new concept and has come into vogue in the last two decades. In my childhood and home, we never celebrated this day, and later when Father’s Day had become popular and we would wish our father, he would just brush aside our wishes with a faint smile on his face. As I look back, we celebrated each day of the year as Father’s Day. For my siblings and me, our world revolved around him and he had a deep influence on us while growing up.
Besides, playing the role of provider, protector, and disciplinarian, he was our teacher too. Not only did he teach us our school subjects in his free time but also taught us about different aspects of life. He was a learned man and could speak non-stop on varied subjects – be it astronomy, science, mathematics, geology, history, geography, economics, politics, or spirituality. Most important were his life lessons which he taught us through his experiences and are not available in any textbook. When we were younger, we did not grasp or appreciate his life lessons much and sometimes even showed our repugnance too. Later as we flew away from the nest and got exposed to the vagaries of life, we started understanding, correlating, and valuing his life lessons and guidance.
Though I may have never celebrated Father’s Day, I would like to celebrate it this year when he is no more with us. The celebration will be not a frivolous fanfare but a solemn one. I thought of various ways of paying tribute to my beloved father on his day. Finally, I felt that the best way to commemorate him was by penning down some of the life lessons he taught us. These life lessons were imparted to us in informal settings and unstructured manner and are relevant to all women, irrespective of which era they are born in.
Being a woman, gender should not come your way
He advocated gender equality. My sister and I were encouraged to take up tasks that were considered to be part of the male bastion.
Besides teaching us to drive geared vehicles as soon as we attained the driving age, we were taught to change flat tires or clean the spark plug of the scooter. We had to maintain our vehicles regularly. He believed that every woman should know to drive independently and not depend on men in the family for commuting.
You can do hard things
My father instilled in us to do hard things early on. He had never let us slip into our comfort zone. The moment one hard task was over, he would challenge us to accomplish the next level.
He was particular about our maintaining good physical and mental wellness. It was not to look better or have a perfect body but to make us tough and build resilience.
He exposed us to the world as much as possible with the aim of making us strong and wanted us to know the realities of life from an early age. He wanted us to be prepared in case life shows its ugly face. We were not allowed to live in a cocoon or in a hypothetical world. Being a forward-looking person, he excitedly jumped when my sister and I got opportunities to live in different cities, far away from home for education and work purposes.
We were taught all sorts of practical life skills, including going on errands to banks, post offices, train booking offices, and other such offices independently to understand the functioning of different departments in reality. By giving us varied responsibilities in the household, we got exposed to different aspects of life which helped us in developing a sense of responsibility, self-reliance, competence, and resilience.
Be a constant learner
My father was a very inquisitive person with a sharp memory and good analytical skills. He continuously kept reading and kept himself abreast with the latest technology and other happenings around. Due to his foresight, we were the first few households in our area to install a computer and the internet at home. That was the era when people preferred to use the services of cybercafés instead of owning a computer system at home.
He preferably liked to interact with younger people more even during his fag end of life because he believed that there was a lot to learn from them. “Information is wealth” was his favorite statement. He emphasized excessively collecting information about different things for easy decision-making and problem-solving.
He maintained a very congenial and intellectually charged-up atmosphere at home. Every now and then he used to assign small projects to us apart from our course curriculum in which we had to do some critical thinking. There was no Google or any other search engine at that time. We had to physically visit libraries and research using an encyclopedia or other books. In the process of finding one thing in the library, we used to learn a few more different things. This was a great learning process for us.
Live within your means
My father was our provider while we were growing up and our first financial advisor when we were starting out in our careers. I value his nuggets of wisdom and life experiences related to money. I still thoroughly follow his advice regarding buying things only that are a necessity and within budget. He was never against spending money for the right purposes but was against mindless consumerism. Even now, being calculated in my spending habits helps me in saving for the future and value whatever I already have. His teaching on frugal living was an essential life skill that prepared us for the inevitable ups and downs of life.
Lead a healthy sustainable lifestyle
His emphasis on leading a healthy sustainable lifestyle was exemplary and we were practically exposed to it during our growing-up years without knowing modern jargon like ‘sustainable lifestyle’, ‘eco-friendly’, ‘carbon footprint’ etc. He inculcated healthy habits that caused minimum damage to the planet and had a positive impact on the people around us.
We had healthy homemade food, preferably produced by local farmers. To give us a taste of global cuisine, he used to give us ideas to prepare different dishes from the local farm produce and also suggested local substitutes for the ingredients of global cuisines. He instilled in us the art and joy of cooking just by giving us ideas and being our critic. It used to be good fun working in our kitchen laboratory to try out different cuisines and churn out interesting dishes. The enthusiasm to experiment using different permutations and combinations of food ingredients and preparing new recipes continues within us to date.
Khaadi and handloom fabrics were his preferred choice of clothing because they are body-friendly, can be worn in any weather, and provide employment to people.
He abhorred the ridiculous overuse of “single-use” plastic. His contribution to saving the planet was by always carrying a reusable cloth bag to market.
He used to give old newspapers and our household waste goods to street urchins so that they could earn some money by selling them in scrap. This was a good way of dissuading the street children from begging.
This is not an all-inclusive list of life lessons imparted by my father to his children but just a glimpse of it. I owe all my little accomplishments to this great man and also to the one who provided him energy to always move ahead, that is my mother. This man has left the world making an indelible imprint on his children and the people around him. He was like the captain of a ship who carefully and safely navigated his ship to shores, weathering many storms, and decided to alight after handing over the “Sengol” to his children. Hope this time he will accept my Father’s Day wishes wholeheartedly from wherever he is and not shrug it off like in previous years.
– Nivedita Chitnis, a writer and editor from India, works as a corporate HR Generalist and has contributed to co-authoring books as well as writing for Indian newspapers.
