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THE pardesi piya is the not-so-unsung hero of
the money-order economy. His batty beloved is the one who talks to the birds
in our thumris: Do cry my tale of woe, she tells the crow .And please keep
the pipi down; she implores the Papiha, otherwise known as brain fever bird,
because it keeps reminding her of her own tardy letter writer.
Has the advent of cell phone and flower express made such a character
redundant in the age of the iPod, iMix and karaoke ? Not really if you go by
the current ornithological specimen called kirogi appa. It means 'goose
father' in Korean and describes the lonely paterfamilias who is forced to
stay behind, to slog and send money to his wife and kids who have flown the
coop, jetting abroad in search of education and fluency in English.
More than 200,000 Korean goslings, from the elementary to graduate grades,
currently study abroad, making Korea arguably the world's biggest supplier
of overseas students. Add to the financial cost (estimated at $5 billion a
year ) the emotional and psychological toll of maintaining these wannabe
swans across foreign waters and you have a recipe for a sociological
disaster: the father geese pining for the family are forced to turn into
migratory visitors themselves, thanks to the distance-killing prowess of the
jumbo jet. But this by no means puts an end to the spate of tragic Kirogi
life stories, including suicides that often make head -lines in Korean
papers.
What this means is that while absence does make the heart fonder,
it can also literally break the ticker. Most father geese are in their 40s
and 50s, an age when maintaining a good diet and healthy lifestyle becomes
vital because chronic health problems begin to surface during this period.
However, since the gander often lives alone and has to fend for himself
after years of being cosseted by mother goose, he feeds irregularly and
unhealthily. Worse, he may take to drink to drown his sorrow; for no amount
of frequent flier miles can alter what the poet John Donne so eloquently
expressed -- no man is an island, entire of itself. And if he inept and
embarrassed about expressing his feelings of helplessness honestly as Korean
men traditionally are because they fear loss of face, you have a perfect
script for a swan song. But it doesn't have to be so. Don't put all your
emotional eggs in the family basket. Connect to the community too. Cherish
yourself. |
