There’s a lot actually, but when you’re not privileged, you have to learn to brush it and laugh it off, no matter how painful it is. I know, not the best way to approach, but I can’t complain.
Well, for starters, I was born to a family of uneducated people. Dad lost his father in his teen years, came to Mumbai, didn’t complete his 10th, tortured to near-death as a slave in Saudi Arabia in the 80s, survived and lost everything in the Kuwait war, and came back penniless to the village. Mom barely completed her B.Com, but she was a woman, so forced by her father to not work. Made to marry a poor guy like my dad. Was the butt of joke within the close relatives.
My mother would tell me, as a seven year old child how she wanted to kill herself and the two of us (my other sibling) by injesting rat poison, because reasons. And for the same reason, we left our village and came to Mumbai.
Everything was hard for me. Education, friends, accomodation to society. Dad did his best to send me to the best school. But we always stood out.
If there was a birthday party, I could not go. If it was my birthday party, I would not call anyone out of embarrassment. My house wasn’t large, we didn’t have a fridge, a sofa, AC, washing machine or even a bed. I mean, if I bring a kid, how do I explain my situation?
Kids would talk about stuff Pokemon or DBZ, or games like GTA and CoD to socialize, and I had not an iota of what that was. I left behind my culture and language, so when I used to visit our native place, I could not talk, I was an alien to my own culture. So, all my childhood, I was a loner. Also no partner, but I don’t really care about that.
During my teen years, I used to see kids with all those SBC board (Raspberry PIs, Arduinos, some other brands I don’t remember). I always wanted them, I loved robotics and was fascinated about remote controlled toys. But money. We could not spend money on such stuff, or we’d have to sleep hungry.
At first, I never realised how much privilege childrens of educated parents had, until I reached the 12 grade. It was the final exam, after which students would prepare for university exams. I had no knowledge about it. No body told me about JEE or NEET. I didn’t even know about international exams like the TOEFL, IELTS or SAT. People start preparing for JEE during their 7th class. I was late by five years, and I had no way to get into a prestigious university.
During this time, I requested my parents to let me try SAT and TOEFL to try my luck in the USA. I backed out after checking the overall cost. It was already tough for us to earn in rupees and paying back a currency like the dollar would be out of the question.
By this time, my mental health was already at its worst. But as I said before, mental health is a privilege of the rich people. For lower classes like us, we do not have the luxury to think about that.
The college which I graduated from, dad had to pay management quota using loans. Management quota is basically for the rich kids, whose dads can blow money. But it was also a convenient way to extort money from illiterate families like ours.
College goes on, it was the same like school. I didn’t learn shit, and graduate with a useless degree with no internship experience in 2022. And it’s been about a year. There’s way too many people there, and limited positions. Employers have the bargaining power. No employee protect laws. Almost like we’re all work as a IT sweatshop wagie.
I worked for some time around November to January as an intern. That place was hell. Rude, ghosting boss would call me randomly after work hour and demand for features in an outdated legacy tech-stack. Then I got really sick, had a case of severe eczema over my body, and I quit the job.
I’m the butt of the joke in my family. My own grandpa made fun of me in the entire village. “They spent xyz money on their child, and they’re jobless”. That doesn’t bother me, but what bothers me is that their words hurt my parents.
I see my dad still working in his 60s, and I feel so hurt and embarrassed. My mom never left the house, even for those weekly resturant or those kitty parties. For all the twenty years, she stayed in, working as a house wife. Neither did we leave our house, because how can you hang out with friends without spending money? And neither did my dad, working all day.
Neither my dad, not my mother got any cut from their respective ancestral property. Neither do we have our own house - we live in a rented house. So, if we are kicked out, we have nowhere to go. Such horrible, back-stabbing relatives. They’re all loaded with cash, they have their own house, and laugh at our misery.
But that’s not all, I also have physical pain to deal with. I have a painful prolapsed rectum. I’ve been living with this since the last two to three years. Haven’t told my parents, because that would blow away the last remaining backup money that’s keeping us fed. I’d rather die than embarrass myself on the dystopian nightmare called online philanthropy. I get nightmares about my dad dying from a heart attack before even getting to enjoying the normal. Was was the point of all that money he spent on us, when both of them could’ve been childfree instead?
Sorry if the grammar is bad, I’m trying to muffle my crying, so it’s hard to type. Mom is in the room next to me, with an already fucked up mental health, and I am trying not to do anything to make it worse. But yeah, the fake smiles, they work all the time.
It’s alright, there’s no rush. My first instinct would’ve been to help with money, but you mentioned you didn’t want to do online philanthropy (which there’s no shame in asking for, if you ever change your mind).
Your community sounds incredibly insensitive, with how your extended family and community treats you. There is strength in numbers and you only have two people in life. If leaving is out of the question, I would gather everyone else who disagrees with how the community is run. There must be more, and every hole in a bad system must be exploited, in every sense of the word. A system that is reliably bad can be relied on to be bad in one’s favor. I might disagree with other Lemmings on most things, but they’d be surprised at how familiar I am with the system.
In times like these (which I can at least partially relate to), the one thing I’m grateful for is my dog.
There’s a lot actually, but when you’re not privileged, you have to learn to brush it and laugh it off, no matter how painful it is. I know, not the best way to approach, but I can’t complain.
Well, for starters, I was born to a family of uneducated people. Dad lost his father in his teen years, came to Mumbai, didn’t complete his 10th, tortured to near-death as a slave in Saudi Arabia in the 80s, survived and lost everything in the Kuwait war, and came back penniless to the village. Mom barely completed her B.Com, but she was a woman, so forced by her father to not work. Made to marry a poor guy like my dad. Was the butt of joke within the close relatives.
My mother would tell me, as a seven year old child how she wanted to kill herself and the two of us (my other sibling) by injesting rat poison, because reasons. And for the same reason, we left our village and came to Mumbai.
Everything was hard for me. Education, friends, accomodation to society. Dad did his best to send me to the best school. But we always stood out.
If there was a birthday party, I could not go. If it was my birthday party, I would not call anyone out of embarrassment. My house wasn’t large, we didn’t have a fridge, a sofa, AC, washing machine or even a bed. I mean, if I bring a kid, how do I explain my situation?
Kids would talk about stuff Pokemon or DBZ, or games like GTA and CoD to socialize, and I had not an iota of what that was. I left behind my culture and language, so when I used to visit our native place, I could not talk, I was an alien to my own culture. So, all my childhood, I was a loner. Also no partner, but I don’t really care about that.
During my teen years, I used to see kids with all those SBC board (Raspberry PIs, Arduinos, some other brands I don’t remember). I always wanted them, I loved robotics and was fascinated about remote controlled toys. But money. We could not spend money on such stuff, or we’d have to sleep hungry.
At first, I never realised how much privilege childrens of educated parents had, until I reached the 12 grade. It was the final exam, after which students would prepare for university exams. I had no knowledge about it. No body told me about JEE or NEET. I didn’t even know about international exams like the TOEFL, IELTS or SAT. People start preparing for JEE during their 7th class. I was late by five years, and I had no way to get into a prestigious university.
During this time, I requested my parents to let me try SAT and TOEFL to try my luck in the USA. I backed out after checking the overall cost. It was already tough for us to earn in rupees and paying back a currency like the dollar would be out of the question.
By this time, my mental health was already at its worst. But as I said before, mental health is a privilege of the rich people. For lower classes like us, we do not have the luxury to think about that.
The college which I graduated from, dad had to pay management quota using loans. Management quota is basically for the rich kids, whose dads can blow money. But it was also a convenient way to extort money from illiterate families like ours.
College goes on, it was the same like school. I didn’t learn shit, and graduate with a useless degree with no internship experience in 2022. And it’s been about a year. There’s way too many people there, and limited positions. Employers have the bargaining power. No employee protect laws. Almost like we’re all work as a IT sweatshop wagie.
I worked for some time around November to January as an intern. That place was hell. Rude, ghosting boss would call me randomly after work hour and demand for features in an outdated legacy tech-stack. Then I got really sick, had a case of severe eczema over my body, and I quit the job.
I’m the butt of the joke in my family. My own grandpa made fun of me in the entire village. “They spent xyz money on their child, and they’re jobless”. That doesn’t bother me, but what bothers me is that their words hurt my parents.
I see my dad still working in his 60s, and I feel so hurt and embarrassed. My mom never left the house, even for those weekly resturant or those kitty parties. For all the twenty years, she stayed in, working as a house wife. Neither did we leave our house, because how can you hang out with friends without spending money? And neither did my dad, working all day.
Neither my dad, not my mother got any cut from their respective ancestral property. Neither do we have our own house - we live in a rented house. So, if we are kicked out, we have nowhere to go. Such horrible, back-stabbing relatives. They’re all loaded with cash, they have their own house, and laugh at our misery.
But that’s not all, I also have physical pain to deal with. I have a painful prolapsed rectum. I’ve been living with this since the last two to three years. Haven’t told my parents, because that would blow away the last remaining backup money that’s keeping us fed. I’d rather die than embarrass myself on the dystopian nightmare called online philanthropy. I get nightmares about my dad dying from a heart attack before even getting to enjoying the normal. Was was the point of all that money he spent on us, when both of them could’ve been childfree instead?
Sorry if the grammar is bad, I’m trying to muffle my crying, so it’s hard to type. Mom is in the room next to me, with an already fucked up mental health, and I am trying not to do anything to make it worse. But yeah, the fake smiles, they work all the time.
It’s alright, there’s no rush. My first instinct would’ve been to help with money, but you mentioned you didn’t want to do online philanthropy (which there’s no shame in asking for, if you ever change your mind).
Your community sounds incredibly insensitive, with how your extended family and community treats you. There is strength in numbers and you only have two people in life. If leaving is out of the question, I would gather everyone else who disagrees with how the community is run. There must be more, and every hole in a bad system must be exploited, in every sense of the word. A system that is reliably bad can be relied on to be bad in one’s favor. I might disagree with other Lemmings on most things, but they’d be surprised at how familiar I am with the system.
In times like these (which I can at least partially relate to), the one thing I’m grateful for is my dog.
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