The Hindu Business Line : His rightful place

It is not about family values as understood in the West or the US during Presidential election campaigns. It is not also about the neglect of aged parents which will be taken care of at least legislatively by the proposed Parents and Senior Citizens’ Maintenance Bill about to be passed by Parliament if it is not prorogued. Actually, this is about family values or, more precisely, the value of the householder or the head of the house in a family prorogue.

There has been an almost insidious and relentless movement to banish him from his pride of place in the layout of his own house. It is a moot point whether this is due to members of the female gender increasingly taking to engineering, architecture and interior designs. However, in recent times, no other entity in a house has sacrificed so much in so a short time and that too without even being aware of it.

Watchful eyes

Years ago, in our fathers’ and grand-fathers’ days in laying out a dwelling, there would always be an office room right at the entrance overlooking a small verandah through which everyone had to pass to gain access to the interior halls (koodam) and onwards to the kitchen, store, pantry et all.

There would be a table and a chair for the patriarch and an easy chair too; a bench or a few chairs for the visitors. Not a single living creature could cross his watchful eyes even if he was seemingly immersed in reading the daily newspaper.

This also ensured that all visitors were dealt with at the entrance and only inmates or close relations and friends who were welcome by the matriarch of the house could go beyond this threshold, usually comprising cooks, drivers, maids or errand boys of the family. In effect, he was the front office of a house, performing the duties of a watchman, receptionist and an accountant — for arranging settlement of dues of vendors and bill collectors — all rolled into one.

Ubiquitous desktop

Today, in the so-called modern luxury flats, there is not a single place for the patriarch to call his own. The house seems to be only full of bedrooms and bathrooms. The hall has become a home theatre with digital surround and a din of cacophony with channels blaring almost non-stop.

The bedroom has to be shared with the missus and the ubiquitous desktop. The kitchen has expanded with counters and is kept so sparkling clean making the casual visitors among the old timers wonder whether any cooking takes place at all in such a lovely inset. Even bathrooms — although they are occupied less than an hour everyday — seem to have scored over the space needs of the men of the house.

Vendors and outsiders, if allowed by the gurkha at the gate, often become witnesses to the daily brouhaha between the inmates.

At a higher plane of abstraction, is it a manifestation of the female’s subliminal urge to conquer the men?

In fact, for much more serious issues involving oppression of males, rights groups are now active all over the world in highlighting the preponderance of males among those who commit suicides; they are generally drug addicts or alcoholics.

Displacing men from households can be added as a footnote to the agenda in the struggle for restoring their rightful place.

(The author is former Member, Ordnance Factories.)

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