but things always move on.. far more likely i might be trying to get them to have a relationship ( i know i’m not bothered if any kids i might have didnt want to get married } with a human rather than say a machine or cyborg or something. Or stay on planet earth even though it were crumbling and everyone was going to Mars. so it would probably be getting used to having your kids having relationships with Martians..

“mind you, if mummy’s boy didn’t marry HER choice of girl he’d probably get an earful too, especially if she were a ‘kaala’ or something! ‘Oh you dont want to give your mother nice looking grandchildren? oh! you dont’ care for your family at all!”

Heh. Do you think you will be like that when you get older, Sonia?

Extended famili is one reason asian guys are so dependent on their sisters, mothers and wives heh

yeah ain’t that the truth thara old buddy.

Sonia. You a single Bengali women living alone in a foreign country? How did you get your family to agree to that? That aint Bengali since most rents think if they gives their daughter that much freedom she will get up to no good. People will talk. Then she wont be considered a good bride and all that rah rah stuff.

that provided me with a good deal of amusement, thanks thara, i haven’t had such a good laugh in ages. Yes, me poor dear, that’s a very good analysis that of vat a lot of people would people say! ( and yes, as jai points out, i am indeed married) however i haven’t always been, and indeed was a single young bengali girl who has lived without momma and poppa since she was 17, and a different country too! shock horror indeed. (the joys of university eh? i never understood why more people don’t go somewhere else other than home town to study) obviously my poor mummy daddy always knew i was never going to be considered a ‘good bride’ anyway.. and that i’d prob. have to find my own husband anyway…(plus if anyone was ever going to get up to no good the best place for that is dhaka, and id already had my fill of that when i was 14, as my poor parents already knew, and probably figured good ol’ blighty could be hardly any more corrupting, and they were right }

21. yep..but don’t forget the irish desi!

Guys seem to have all the fun, whatever the religion, culture or context. Nothing much to limit our freedom to do as we please.

Arif’s comments @8 are particularly illuminative. Very accurate and perceptive.

heh sofia totally hear you! and desi..i know what exactly what you mean..i get really uptight about my privacy the more it gets threatened. perhaps this is why i learned to lock myself into bathrooms so much around family – its the only place you can actually get some privacy!

good points razib. i think if you’re a bit ‘odd’/differnet in some ways, the super-conformity aspects of familial societies/families can feel like prison. anything a bit out of the ordinary is commented on – can’t escape the scrutiny. ‘oh my god! everyone will think you’re a pagal!’. this is of course much worse when folks live in ‘desh’ as everyone is so bloody appearance oriented and worrying about what the joneses will think. i really hate that, i can’t ever go home without people scrutinising my attire and saying ‘YOU CANT go out like that, people will say YOU’RE Mad’..and its something minor as like slightly ripped chappals or not combing your hair or something. and god help you if you express socialistic views or something, or even worse – a lack of patriotism. What you don’t love your country? no i don’t love ‘countries’. Pagal! Bad person! after a while you keep things to yourself, unless you enjoy courting more controversy, or you can’t help yourself. ( like me) of course the worst is religion, which really makes me itch, its this whole ‘WE are …’. Are ‘we’? Speak for yourself! Of course some families are better at these sorts of things than others. i find my extended family very very frustrating because of our background and what seems to me to be inbuilt imperialism, or certainly a widely held perception that people can carry on being imperialist. try to challenge that and you get accused to not honouring your family and all that. certainly its had a lot to do with influencing my thinking and current outlook. i guess we are all shaped by our families aren’t we..

i attribute the success of our interfamily dynamic to the “short but frequent” strategy – we’ve been in the habit of family visiting on late saturday afternoons since childhood and the same goes for overseas relations, they’re always welcome for short visits and vice-versa. it’s when you don’t see people very often that you feel you have to get maximum value out of it – and it’s when you see them too much that you squander your time on minutiae and gossip.

i also think it’s much better to borrow money from family providing that trust is maintained and nobody takes the piss – and we’re not talking a lot of money here either or long-term. the larger the amount, the more often in my experience it goes horribly wrong. my parents paid the deposit on my first flat, but i made dam’sure i paid them back with interest when i moved and even given trust, i felt they got a bit jumpy around the time of the sale, because they just had to trust that i wouldn’t stiff them. sure, it’s perhaps not a profit-maximising arrangement, but my mum thinks it’s better to borrow from family than to pay interest to a financial services company. i guess the more financially interdependent you are the more beholden you are to your “stakeholders”. mrs bb has had a awful time with her family who are well-off and terribly paranoid and controlling; in fact, it’s the same story all over, the more money, the worse the arguments and the more likely to end up spending money on lawyers, which is no help to anyone at all.

b’shalom

bananabrain

Sofia’s very, very right about the gossip though, get chatting to an estate matriarch of any ethnicity and you’ll be there for hours.

“my fiance has lived in italy for 2 years. we meet her italian friends now. italians are grown-up babies, especially the men. the tendencies we’re talking about are not desi vs. white, they’re “modern northwest european” vs. everyone else. i think the “modern northwest european” modality is going to spread though….”

Different degrees though. It is not just a question of close knit families: Indian “immediate” families are larger than southern Europeans, as they include cousins, second-cousins, in-laws and their families.

Personally, I think it is not healthy to be dependent on your family when you reach adulthood, and let them decide on your life. However, my perception of Northern European families is that it is somewhat cold and distant… surely there must be a balance.

my fiance has lived in italy for 2 years. we meet her italian friends now. italians are grown-up babies, especially the men. the tendencies we’re talking about are not desi vs. white, they’re “modern northwest european” vs. everyone else. i think the “modern northwest european” modality is going to spread though….

(some of the reasons that people are familial in bangladesh are prosaic, the country is f-king small!!! you move 50 miles away, and you can still keep in touch)

I remember when my ex-fiance’s mother, who’s Sicilian, got really disturbed when I closed myself into a room because I needed a break from everyone for at least 10 minutes. “What’s wrong, DI? Are you feeling depressed? Come, come, I’ll make you coffee and you can tell me all about it.” Grrr…. I mean, she was being incredibly nice, but yo.

I can say that w/r/t the white folks I grew up with. I’m not singling out the white kids because I’m being racist; but when I was growing up, racism from whites was a major issue many of us non-white kids had to deal with, even to the point of hate crimes and violence, so people from my generation have been somewhat scarred.