It all starts with a pair of Jeans / Genes. Genes are detectable regions of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, whereas Jeans are trousers traditionally made from denim. There have been scientists claiming that genes are responsible for the traits observed in the offspring, however there have been no claimants to the fact that both Jeans & Genes influence the behavior & traits of any individual.

Friends, let me make an attempt to decipher the paternal influence on the human behavior or at least a significant part of it. As mentioned above, “It all starts with a pair of Jeans/ Genes”. Genes are the intrinsic & biological explanation whereas Jeans are the extrinsic & psychological explanation of the human tendencies to display behavioral characteristics similar to that of their parents.

All it takes is for the father to hand down his pair of jeans, worn during his college years, to his son at the time of the latter’s adolescence. That’s when one begins to think like a son of his dad. The first time you slip into your dad’s jeans is when your imagination strolls to the years gone by, standing in front of the mirror wondering if that’s what your dad looked like when he was in his teens? An indescribable feeling grips you & you start finding features of resemblance to your dad. This undying feeling quits only when it’s the turn of the kin to become a father himself. This phenomenon elucidates one’s desire to be like his father, quite aptly expressed by UGLY KID JOE in CATS IN THE CRADLE.

Clothing is & will always be a significant ingredient of hand-downs from one generation to the subsequent. The scent of these handed down clothing is what makes one nostalgic, not about his own past but rather about his sire’s. Clothes handed down through more than one generation fills up strong emotions of legacy & inheritance. Watching his son wear the clothes he once wore to college lights up a dad’s face & the very moment is so picturesque that no artist can capture it with his art but only a son’s memory can arrest it to treasure it for the rest of his lifetime. Just as you approach the time to experience the working man’s blues, you suggest your dad to hand over the ties he wore daily to earn bread & butter but consistently ensured that we had more on the platter than just bread & butter.



For a dad who spent his working life designing gear boxes & his son whose friends think he’s fanatical enough to identify an automobile just by hearing the noise of it in the middle of the night, Automobiles form a huge part of their bonding & every drive together has a special place in their hearts. It is too much of a coincidence to handle when a dad & his son end up driving the same machine, of course their models speak for the generation gap but the name behind it remains the same. The faint memories of drives with his dad’s engine roaring through the narrow lanes of his hometown just come screaming back when a son drives through those lanes with a picture of his junior driving with him someday. With Bruce Springsteen singing My Hometown in the background, these joyrides instill a feeling of inverse Déjà Vu.

The endless efforts of a dad trying to explain to his 12 year old the workings of an automobile suddenly become as important as any other LESSONS OF LIFE and after every such session you almost feel like you can rip apart an automobile because the amount of gyan imparted during these sessions is nothing less that what a PhD student would study for his theses.



Music is a life saver. Changing the record tracks to the songs your dad once listened to might be like freshly introducing your friends to boredom but all it does for you is that it jogs your memory back to your teenage days when your dad hummed these tracks while driving his old car. Browsing through your dad’s huge stacks of cassette collection makes you feel like all the technological innovations that compress the feelings conveyed through these cassettes into objects as flat as glazy parquet flooring, are so insignificant that they can never replace the old world charm of slipping a record into the player and impatiently rewinding until you get to a track on which you and your dad start humming “Rah Rah Rasputin.. Lover of the Russian Queen” or “Hey Jude...” When you flip through the pages of the lyrics books that your dad collected as a teenager, you feel like suggesting to a friend who smells a book by its contents that these books smell more like their owner than like their contents...they smell like dad.



Ideas change life or at least they hold the prospects of influencing perceptions about an event into the future. The prospects of listening to your parent’s recordings of your toddler voice just give you relief after embarking on a so far unrewarding journey to find a cuteness factor in you.



People’s comments about how your looks exactly resemble your dad’s in his teens, reaffirms your faith in Dr. Mendel and his crazy theories about genomic inheritance !

The inclination towards sporting a stubble look or rather termed by certain people as indolence towards shaving bears are a testimony to these theories. Looks can’t deceive at least not when you have two generations as witnesses.



A family with three generations studying in the same college has a special attachment towards the college. If you happen to be the third generation, you are burdened to live up to your ancestral wisdom, not by anybody else but by yourself. It is crazy to have conversations with your dad and your dad’s dad about how the college came across at different times within a timeline of almost a century. Hang outs to a college are what pistons are to a good engine and having hung out at joints that date back to what your granddad refers to as his college days, just keeps you wondering whether your dad and his dad occupied the same tables that you frequented doing nothing. Stories about the menu, the crowd, the ambience of such places keeps you enthralled during conversations with your former generations. Of course these stories don’t stop when you happen to visit these places with your old man and his older man. All you do then is wear your virtual reality shades and sneak into the yesteryears to find a visual affirmation to the legends being narrated.



Well I have to end my commentary somewhere as the reasons to love your parents and their hand downs are myriad. So let me bring down the curtains by proposing a self tailored explanation to my egoistic persona...
“Your dad’s greatest hand down is yourself...so if you love your dad and his hand downs then you love yourself!!!” Cheers!!!