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March 27, 2003
Physician, heal thyself
Some people can’t help but poke their noses into other peoples’ business but then they must pay the price for being a menace to those who clearly didn’t ask for their opinions, writes Sadia Hassan
In a discussion with friends the other day on people poking their nose into other people’s lives, I mentioned a great-aunt of mine who aptly fits the type. She was a widow and lived with a married younger brother whose wife was thoroughly disgusted with her nosy habits.
One day the brother said to her, very patiently and tenderly, “Apa, you say you have no complaints, then why do you have to interfere in everything and torment your sister-in-law like this?” The irrational but rather interesting reply was, “Brother, as long as I live in this house I shall interfere. When I am gone she can do as she likes.”
The question then arose why we are so fond of interfering in matters that don’t concern us when most of us are not capable of living our own lives with any degree of success; and why are women the worst offenders in this regard. Part of the answer lies in our national psyche and the fact that we belong to the East. Eastern people are more gregarious and social and are much more involved in each other’s lives even if they are not so connected.
In the subcontinent we are not taught to draw a line on matters that are strictly personal to others and not our concern at all. Brought up as we are on the biradari system and mohalladari based on closely knitted extended families, everyone takes it as understood that whatever happens in the neighbourhood is a collective concern. Actually, at that middle class level no one calls it interference.
Social life in bigger cities is no longer based on that old pattern. The composition and complexities of the clan and the immediate neighbourhood has undergone a drastic change because of an increase in population and rapid urbanization all over the country. In the myriad of new urban colonies developing everywhere, everyone is a stranger and nobody is bothered any longer about who is who. By the time you get intimate, your neighbours move out and somebody else occupies the place.
This has its adverse side too, for it has reduced people’s helpful interest in one another and the willingness to come to the aid of neighbours in time of need. Perhaps the greatest contribution to the change was made by the immigration of millions of people during partition. The old way of life in which everyone knew everyone else in one’s vicinity — whether Hindu or Muslim or Sikh — was so disturbed as to never surface again. People who had been your neighbours for generations were dispersed and went elsewhere.
While this did away with the praiseworthy practice of helpfulness and regard for one another, for instance the beautiful concept “A daughter of the mohalla is everyone’s daughter,” it also reduced the habit of socializing to mere gossip and an almost malicious interest in the embarrassments and shortcomings of one’s neighbours. This habit has assumed most unfortunate proportions. We just cannot seem to do without it. Our lives would become dull and drab if we were required to rid ourselves of this pastime. There would be no excitement left in living and more than half the fun of community existence would be lost.
Gossip and scandal are not all fun. There is sometimes a streak of tragedy in them. If someone were to analyze the causes of broken marriages, shattered homes, estranged couples, children going wayward and disobedient, parents losing trust in them and similar other family misfortunes, outside interference would turn out to be a very big reason.
In almost all such cases of family disruption the well-meaning but disastrous contribution of friends and relations would be invariably discovered. It is our bad luck, or rather our faulty education and upbringing that very few among us are able to play a positive role in bringing people together. Most of us are somehow designed and conditioned to spread discord even where our intentions are of the best.
It is really a matter of grief that women brought up on the tradition of good neighbourliness should degenerate into vicious nosy parkers with no capacity for healing breaches. Our interference knows no bounds, and whether our relations with our extended family are intimate or not we want them to live life as we live it, to hold opinions that we hold, and meet only those people of whom we approve.
On the flimsiest of acquaintance we announce bonds of sisterhood with strange women and either allow them to run our lives for us or we try to make them lead their lives in our fashion. We must interfere in their plans to educate their children. We must tell them how a wedding ceremony or a celebration is to proceed. We sometimes even dictate to them what to eat and how to eat and what to wear and what not to wear.
Some of us take it as a personal offense if we are not consulted in these matters. I have known brothers and sisters breaking off relations just because their advice was not sought in arranging a match for a son or daughter or in buying or selling a house. In this interfering spirit we want to decide what people should give a daughter on her wedding, and of course we feel it a duty to criticize if somebody’s daughter-in-law has not brought a good dowry.
We may be neither qualified to give sensible advice nor gifted with superior wisdom or greater common sense. We ourselves may be quarrelsome wives, ignorant mothers, careless sisters and inconsiderate daughters, but we must deliver homilies to others on how to be ideal in these four roles. The new way of life in which many women are involved in jobs and professions has done much to take the sting out of this neighbourly pastime, but that is because we have no time for it. I am sure many of us miss it and would love to go back to indulging in it.
None of us is perfect. The next person may know more about something or the other that we don’t. So, do seek advice, and do give it when it is sought from you. But it is quite another game to act the Know-all. Do not give anyone the opportunity to say to you, “Physician, heal thyself!”
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