Ever tried explaining to a kid that the tooth fairy is a giant made-up lie? It’s like trying to reason with a brown parent who wants to feed you three tablespoons of coconut oil mixed in a glass of hot lemon water topped with a dash of turmeric because the credible people over at the medical department of Whatsapp university said it would boost immunity. From UNESCO declaring our national anthem the best in the world (on every Independence day) to news about an Earth-ending meteor hitting the planet one month from now (every other month)— it never fails to amaze me how my parents take every Whatsapp forward as the gospel. With the festive season coming up, you already know it’s time for the pictures from NASA showing the difference between the lights in India on a normal day vs on ~Diwali~. Same pictures, every year.
Parents vs Technology
Phone Settings
If there was one technological quirk thing that could connect parents all over the country it would be screen brightness. Never have I ever met a Gen X or Baby Boomer whose phone hasn’t blinded me. Couple that with extra large font sizes irrespective of the fact that they have reading glasses or not, a plethora of apps running in the background that they’ve never bothered to close (most likely because they don’t know how to), an extra loud ringtone, keypad click sounds and you’ve got yourself an example of what every brown parent’s phone looks like.
Parents And Video Calls
I think my parents forget that video calls are a two-way street and that they have to hold the phone in a way where I get to see their entire faces as well, not just their foreheads and moving eyebrows. That’s not all— ask them to flip the camera to see something on the other side of the room and their entire phone does a 180 to show you. Switching to the back camera? What’s that?
Social Media
Why have a profile picture of yourself when you can have one of your kids? Brown parents have a special talent for finding the most hideous pictures of their children to post on their social media accounts. If your parents are active users of these photo-sharing apps, firstly, congratulations for not losing your mind trying to explain the maze and secondly, you know I’m right when I say that parents either won’t post a single picture for months on end or put twenty-two feed posts and twelve stories after one family function, there is no in between. Don’t even get me started on YouTube– I’ve only truly learned the definition of falling down a rabbit hole when I saw my mom starting off with a chicken curry recipe and ending up on an Alia Bhatt lookalike video lipsyncing to Kesariya two hours later.
The dysfunctional relationship between my parents and technology used to make me want to pull my hair out in frustration, until I started finding the humour in it. They teach me how to do my taxes and I teach them how to not get scammed out of their money by falling for a Whatsapp forward, it’s called balance. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Also read about Decoding Mom Logic: Food Is The Ultimate Love Language
