With the above peripherals thus placed I looked at the main Actors – my parents, who lived in the farmhouse, for divine inspiration. My Dad, despite being a hardcore farmer by occupation has spend the over four decades doing work outside the farm rather than inside – meaning he has enough logic (& some knowledge) in him to be invited to sort out, among other things peculiar to the country side: cow, goat or buffalo trespassing border issues, road & water thoroughfare problems, property separation pangs, community sharing etc. His day started with barking orders to my poor unlettered Mom and closing the day by wining that nothing he had earlier yelled has been done and if at all – not the way he would have precisely liked it and then ending with the famous lines “ If, I am not here nothing ever happens”. Well, he was never there (never tried to) and yet everything happened and I went on to study in a great boarding school and did my engineering in the oldest Engineering College in Asia and joined a lignite digging Public Sector Power Company and meanwhile Mom became a superb agriculturist. However, this Dad-Mom mode of working, never evolved much and continues to this day!

‘Doing Farm Work outside the Farm’ had its toll and my Dad lost the ability to actually get new things done along with the pressures of aging and body wear & tear. He was too nice to the workers or pampered them unnecessarily to keep them on! Further, he never lost and opportunity (considered it a binding duty) to attend a Wedding, a coming-of-age function (common in the Villages where a proud father announces that his daughter is ready to be taken-in marriage!), house-warming ceremonies, goat-feasts, Wedding ceremony-rites-performance-rights-functions (where a, to-be-bride’s Mom or to-be mother-in-law is purified for “rites activities”), Bride-hunting, Bride & wedding conformation lunches, Temple visiting, etc and including bereavement/last-rites ceremonies. That’s long enough a list to keep one ‘busy on the streets’ for at least 300 days a year, I guess! Now, where is the time for good quality work? He spends about another 50 days grumbling that it is difficult to do agriculture and that farm labour is hard to come by. This despite the about 25 acres of good farming land, reasonably endowed with water - by a stream running through and many not too-deep wells.

With all the learning and worldly wisdom inside me I got to counseling my Dad, applying management principles and giving ‘Steve Jobs Stanford Lectures’. I said; Prioritize your work, do not attend every damn wedding or function, make people come to your doorstep for dispute resolution and simply spend every moment at home. That was like trying to convert a naturally flowing stream in a stationary lake, damming it or making a monument!

But then, this is the way things roll out at least in the south of India – in Tamilnadu. Just about everybody is invited to just about every Function/Ceremony listed above and imagine the crisscrossing movement of people making-up to attend them all! When will all these become more meaningful, warm and enjoyable within a select family circle rather than invite the Town? When will people find time to do better things? Oh when will the Public Limited become limited to the private & personal?