If You had Grown up During Your Grandparent's Time


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I felt dismantled into parts when I read the topic. The probability of me reverse-travelling in time-the fear of me getting banished from the contemporary facilities and the lifestyle in the blink of an eye into the dark wilderness. How can I survive there, having no global information and a superhighway network that has become my breath and existence? Would I get mad in that social isolation?

Once I managed to get past those fears, I felt it cool. That would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to know that time and the people who lived then. If my grandparents had lived and survived during that time, my father and mother gave birth to me and brought me up, what is wrong with imagining the possibility of living during their times?

What if they had no facilities for the information superhighway? 

It's not the material facilities and the trappings of an advanced life that makes people fulfilled their lives. Their needs, aspirations and indulgences were relative to the materials they possessed. The satisfaction they derived was proportional to what they had owned and achieved. It would be rude of me to assume that they led a hopeless life of meagerness and frustration and the darkness deprived of the modern. How could anyone be charged as deprived of what they did not have in their milieu?  

So, if I had grown up during my grandparents' time? 

I had two sets of grandparents of my father's and my mother's. I am a little confused there-the two sets of grandparents hadn't gotten any association until my father married my mother. I was born after that. Until that happened, where would I be growing up with which set of grandparents? That is tricky.  

My grandfather from my mother's side was an astrologer. He lived at a time when my land was under the erstwhile monarchical rule of the kings. My grandfather was a learned person and trusted by the ruling circle. He was one of the Kings fortune tellers. In his oral biodata, he got credits for predicting the course of the king and the kingdom. If the king made plans to conquer the neighbouring country or steal the cows from them, my grandfather would predict its prospects. If my grandfather predicted a bleak outcome, the king would call off his plans or postpone them for another time. So, that was nice to have that power wielding over the ruling king. And my grandfather had often been invited by the neighbouring rulers and the rich men everywhere to make astrological predictions about their future.  

So, if I was growing up during that time and I were a male, I would have been growing up with my grandfather, enjoying the palace's opulence and travelling places and associating with renowned people. If I were a female, I would have been confined within the household, cooking, bringing up children, and entertaining the guests who would arrive home with my grandfather unannounced. Remember, there was no telephonic communication at that time!  

My grandfather from my father's side was a physician in Ayurveda- a noble call running in the family line that was taken up by my father also. They dwelled in a hilly area with a forest milieu.  Large trees were growing in that area, the undergrowth a variety of medicinal plants needed in the preparation of the Ayurvedic concoctions and medications. That was a time of no allopathic medicine, and the family managed the medical care not only for the people in the neighbourhood but from faraway places. From morning till late evening, the family got sickly people from far and near places for consultation and treatments.  

If I were growing up during that time, again a male, I would have taken up medicine as my call, acquainted with the knowledge of the indigenous medications passed down by the resolute people in the field. Kerala has a rich tradition in the field of Ayurveda which is associated with the Buddhist traditions that got appropriated by a section of the people who displaced them and made Ayurveda their business and tradition. That is a sad destiny of the knowledge that was constructed in the Indigenous tradition in many fields.

And if I were a female, I would have been growing up through the experience the same way I would have been with my grandparents on my mother's side.  

Transport mode I would have been using in that period.

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There were no bus services during my grandparents' time.  Aristocrats used horse carts and common people bullock carts.  I wouldn't have minded a ride in a horse cart of bullock carts.  That would have been nice.  

Would sociopolitical issues have bothered me?

Your brain development is a function of the material world. So, as a female, I would have been bothered by the mother-in-law issues, child-rearing, cooking, no rest time, etc, and not about feminism, equal rights, or freedom of communications. As a man, the independence struggle perhaps- colonial forces were in their last leg. And about losing the privileges enjoyed by the royals.  

The end 

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