Father

Father/Daddy/Papa/Baba these are the common names we generally call our Father every day.

In our country father always has a different status in a family. He is supposed to be the head of the family.
It is believed that the father runs the family. He works hard to earn money for the family.

Am I sounding male chauvinist of these words? I don’t know, but, what I have seen and felt I am expressing that.
Earlier I haven’t noticed that fathers are doing household work, like cooking, cleaning the house, chopping the vegetables, washing the utensils, washing the clothes, filling the water bottles, etc. These are the area taken care of by mother and sisters.

Every morning father will go to work and mother or sister would wake up early to prepare his food, creasing his cloth, and make the tiffin so that he can take it with him.

Father would wake up a little late and with the newspaper will have the morning tea, which will be served by mother. Then he will say that he is late for work and all the family members are responsible for that. If the mother wants to say something about the household problems he will say that he has no time now to listen to this.

He will run to the washroom to make him ready and while wearing the cloth for the work will shout for a handkerchief or the purse that he is not finding at that time.

He will run for work and his mother will run behind him with his tiffin box which he forgot.

In the evening he will come back and ask for evening tea with snacks. At that time if the mother complains that the children had done wrong things during the day, obviously the father will say that due to her indiscipline children are becoming naughty, as he is not available during the whole day it is the responsibility of the mother to teach them discipline.

Sometimes he will ask the children that how they are progressing with their studies and if the result of the exam is unsatisfactory, he will put them in boarding school.

In today’s context, I think this portrait of the father has changed. Nowadays mothers are working outside, fathers are maintaining the household activities. Somewhere fathers are becoming house-makers and mothers are head of the family.

I always appreciate these changes.