Joint Families: Love and Happiness Multiplied

Well, I live in a joint family. Zero points for guessing that? We are a total of 16 members, including 4 generations, living in the same house. That’s my family. We’ve been together through thick and thin. And I’m utmost grateful for having them all. This lockdown has only significantly strengthened my belief in joint families. Let me talk about the few key pleasures of having this blessing.

Firstly, you can never get bored! There are so many people at home - you can go on and spend time with different people, and there will always be somebody free to talk or play with. Afternoon chai sessions, badminton sessions, late night card playing sessions, board games, you can do it all without worrying if there will be enough members to play with. In fact, to give you an example, we’re playing badminton regularly in the lockdown - and even when we play in doubles, there are some of us sitting on the sides waiting for their turn (Read - making fun of those actually playing) :D

You get members from different age groups and I can’t stress enough on how valuable that is. Listening to stories from grandparents about their hardships, their achievements, and taking important life lessons. Talking to your chachas, chachis, taus, tais, and just having an extra hand to help you navigate your daily life struggles. (And run to them when your parents don’t agree to something in the hope of convincing them instead! As kids, we did this a lot! :P) And last but not the least, the energy of the house - innocent children. Just their presence itself brings happiness and lightens up the atmosphere. They force you to smile in stress, and make you believe in joy again.

And lastly, when you go through hard times in life, that’s when you actually realise the importance of all these people around you. Any difficulty in life will not just be yours, everybody will be with you to ride it together. Difficult times become easy. Hardships don’t seem that hard. Your strength comes not only from you, but from all these people around you - so you know whatever happens, you will get through it. We’ve had to face many such difficult times together. Like when mom passed away. I have no idea how I would’ve survived it if not for my family and their support. The love and care we got, and the support dad got - I don’t know what we would’ve done without them.

Likewise, when happier times come, the happiness just multiplies many folds and spreads throughout the house. Play and mischief, are all parts of daily life. I still remember, as a child, if mom would not let us watch TV, we would go running to chachi and tai, and watch it with them. Having breakfast together, playing ghar ghar, and all those stupid games - vish amrit, naariyal, stappoo - we played them all and never had to step out of the house. Six people cheering for the elder sibling while he’s playing a computer game? Golden times! Sitting with elders and listening to their childhood stories. And catching them for doing the same things as they scolded us for :D Always making fun of each other. Being a helping hand. Completing each other’s homework. Happiness is all about these little moments. More the people, more the opportunities of creating these moments. And then, just constantly repeating the same incident until every single member of the family has heard about it! That is another level of fun and bonding in itself!

Having a joint family is truly a blessing. Like they say, the more, the merrier. Each person has company from their own generation, and that could be one of the most important aspects of it. As a child, me and my cousins never really had any neighbourhood friends as such - because we were always just busy together!

Stronger together. Jai Jinendra.