Dear Editor,
At this time of year many of us reflect on the year which is about to end: What we did good, what we didn’t do so good and what we did that was terrible. And I think there are many who do not reflect at all. I have occasion to visit many “inner villages” and the plight of some old people pull at my heart-strings. Are the base instincts of lower animals just under the skin of some humans? I am reminded of the bee colony.
How else can it be interpreted when human beings abandon their parents – in a leaky shack or hospital, or wherever, and never show a care thereafter for them?
It would be folly of me to debate whether (those) parents may have done their duty to their children in earlier years. But a basic truism in life might be worthy as a reminder to those who are parents and who have parents: “What goes around comes around”. The anecdote below is appropriate.A son, tired of his wife’s tirade about his sick and useless father, placed his feeble father on his shoulder and headed into the jungle. The father kept asking the son where he was being taken, but the son remained quiet. Troubled, pained—but quiet.
The father’s uncertainty left him as he was taken deeper and deeper into the jungle. His questions became chuckles and then loud laughter. This puzzled the son, who asked his father why he was laughing. The father told the son: “What goes around, comes around sometime”.
The father then told the son that he had, many years back, taken his own sick father into the jungle and left him to die. So he recognised that his son was now going to leave him in the jungle to die in like fashion, and he harboured no ill feeling against his son.
He told his son, however, that he could let the cycle continue or he could stop the cycle. The choice was his son’s.
It didn’t take long for the son to decide that he would not want his son to take him to the jungle and leave him to die. So the son took the father back home.
The wife raged and raged. And the son said firmly: “I will have only one father in this lifetime, but I can have more than one wife”.
Humbly submitted. The interpretation is the reader’s.
Sincerely,
Taajnauth Jadunauth
