Our Pay-rents...oops, I mean Our Parents

The pace of progress has been rampant over the past few years in the “not-so-big” cities of India. With the way development crept into the smaller cities, the price has been paid by the soul of the city. Every step closer to the development has been at the cost of our environment, culture, peace, and most important of all, humanity.
I came across several youngsters who have created a world of their own, outside their families. Parents don’t even seem to know where their kids are. Freedom, space, independence, call it what you may, I believe it is the modernization, or should I say Americanization of Indians. Rate with which old age homes have sprung up in country may be good news for some youngsters, but I would call it alarming. Probably there were parents who packed their love and affection and handed it over their kids on their birthdays. But what about those parents who spent and even sacrificed their happiness, and some even their careers to give a better future to their children. I have come across so many of them who have restricted themselves to the same field, same location, same position, just so that it may not hamper their kids future.
This is the time where I am forced to think what is it that guides or motivates the parents to work so hard for their kids? Everyday we hear cases where the parents are turned out from their homes to old age homes, sometimes even killed by their own people for property. So many times the kid turns out to be a shame for the parents. In spite of knowing all that, what makes the parents so selflessly dedicated to the child. For the mother to take so much pain to bring the kid into this world, for the father to take an extra shift so that he can send the child to a better school, for the mother to keep up the entire night while the child sleeps suffering through fever. There is so much done by them during the age when a child can’t even realize what their parents have done for them. I swear I have not seen any mother or father maintaining an excel file to let their kids know what all they have done for them, and I am not talking about just monetary acts.
We work so hard for our qualifications, for our jobs, and one fine day, we leave for an outstation job, leaving our parents back at home. Is it enough to hand over our salary to them? Money is really everything, isn't it? That is how we would evaluate our parents, would we? Our parents never really threw us out of our house simply because we failed in the exam or had bad handwriting. They accepted us as we were, no adjustments, they were happy to have us as we were, did everything to make us a better person. One of my neighbours had three sons, two of them in US and one in Canada, none is able to adjust with their parents at their home. Hence their father still lives alone in Lucknow so that their children can live happily, ever after. It so seems that all the love and affection we have for our parents is wrapped up and handed over to our mother on a Mother’s day or to our father on Father’s Day, and consider our liabilities fulfilled. They spent on us, so we spent on them, deal is square.
I wouldn’t stretch it too far but just like to end it with a note. I was very young, can’t be very specific about the age but I can say it is something which I clearly remember. My father used to drive a Bajaj Ltd. 150. I used to stand in front of the driver’s seat while he drove. Whenever there was a lot of dust on the road, he would ask me to close my eyes until he said to open them back. I used to follow orders. Once I just thought, “What if I didn’t close my eyes?”. So once on our way to some place, my father asked me to close my eyes. I closed my eyes, but to peek, I just opened one of my eyes, and I saw my father had his palm over my eyes, and was driving with one hand. After some time he removed his hand and said, “Now you can open your eyes”.
Do I really need a “Father’s Day” to love him or say thanks to him?