- Human beings are social animals need no assertation or reiteration. Since times immemorial, this simple fact has not undergone many changes with the fulcrum of humanity circling around families despite encountering innumerable challenges all along. What is a family though? A simple definition is a group of one or two parents and their child or children living together as a unit. People have fought daringly for the families. Emperors have forsaken and/or captured kingdoms for the sake of the families. Protecting honour and dignity of families have induced fiercest battles since millennia. History is replete with infinite such incidents where humankind has left no stone unturned in ensuring family remains at the center of our existence.
PC: Global English Editing
- What is society all about? It’s made up of us, human beings, whose very existence is dependent on conglomeration of families in multitudes allowing us to demarcate our specific identity vis-à-vis area, region, state, and country. What is country after all then? It’s the extension of families within the established area/region within boundaries created by us. Of course, family doesn’t only mean sharing genes or marital status. The definition is expanding joyfully in commensurate with the fast-changing times. For most Indians, family means emotional connection, joyful union, sentimental binding, and leaving behind a legacy worthy of emulation. Despite the modern day kicking in with inalienable changes, the importance/primacy of family remains intact even now.
PC: iPleaders
- In line with the altered world viewpoint, the heady high of any festival is invariably tinged with a sense of minor dread as we prep to spend longer time with The Family – frenzied, frantic, some with high expectations, some fantastic, many annoying, complete with oddballs and the recluse, love and skirmishes, too much food and too little sleep. This is the unchanging dimension of Being Family. Classic definitions all have common residence, members related by birth, marriage or adoption, or by inheritance. Society has travelled a fair distance. That’s not to say old constructs no longer exist but we’ve long ditched the idea of two parents, two kids. The beauty of ever altering society is that it is expanding the family of What’s Family.
PC: Healthline
- Blended, child-free, same-sex, unmarried partners – it’s a healthily growing family. The term single-parent family is not just recognition of parental status but it’s a family type that’s happily become gender neutral too. In the latest, there’s chosen families – friends who’re a support network, a trend seen in LGBTQ+ communities and also among migrant groups. If Covid recentred attention to the importance of family-like support, it also returned many to the idea of communal families – multiple generations or non-relatives living together. Festivals are the perfect time for a nod to the modern concept – and laws and banking rules will eventually reform to keep in step – that family is way beyond sharing genes or status but also all about belonging, care, and a sense of responsibility existing to keep us rooted.
