Old Colony

“Sir, before twenty five years I travelled for 18 hours by train and reached this place. I was doing the right thing at that time. Now my son travelled for 18 hours and got settled in a different continent. It was the right thing for him too.” One could feel pain in the voice of that intimidating, old gentleman who was explaining me about how he had started from scratch and made it big in real estate in Goa, why his son would not like to continue the ready-made, lucrative business here in India, and which ultimately made the old father quit all his projects and pass his sunset days without a sense of security; without his son nearby. He summed up his pain, anger and understanding, “Generation gap!”

The colony (I mean a kind of township, not to be confused with the Medieval times…British colony, French colony etc) where I come from, shares a similar episode. Essentially a middle-class, government servants’ area, the colony today is well-laid out with good roads, water supply, the long-route bus terminus nearby, and individual houses having dozens of coconut, mango and neem trees. The land was all but barren, lined by a metre-gauge railway track, dotted by a few palm trees and thorn bushes, in the outskirts of the city some three decades back. A cent was sold and bought for Rs.100. Today, to get that same one cent area you got to shell out more than Rs.1 Lakh! 1000-fold growth! But more importantly, in these thirty years all those government employees (mainly working with the state government, banks and the then glorious DoT) residing in the area had educated their children in one of those numerous good schools in the city, sent them to professional colleges, got their dreams of their kids working abroad fulfilled, and above all…crossed 58/60 years of age and got retired from their services.

Now most of their engineer sons and daughters are abroad, either they are working in some onsite projects or they have got settled there with their spouses and children. Most of the retired parents of the colony have PCs with a broadband connection and webcam to catch a glimpse of their grand children playing in one of the US coasts. All of them have quite comfortable bank balances, mainly due to the compensation received during retirement, including full leave encashment; also thanks to the remittances from their children. Not to mention they are sitting in lands worth a goldmine.

They plan out for a stay abroad for a couple of weeks, to help out their daughters set up a family, and are quickly back at the colony with loads of apparently jaw-dropping videshi stories for their neighbours, who in turn have their counter-stories, equally mesmerising, about their own abroad trips. Nobody here talks of “Generation gap”. All we get to hear is “Milk is very cheap in the US”, “The roads are very neat ”, “It is very cold there!” etc.

The broadband with the webcam does a fine work; their children give way to the US-born grandchildren; one generation gives way to the next generation; the stories and counter-stories continue incessantly in that colony hidden below the tall coconut trees dancing to the monsoon winds.

As per the MPI’s (Migration Policy Institute) ranking on remittances received by countries in the year 2009, China surprisingly (shockingly?) came only at the second place. No marks for guessing who topped the list.