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06:47 AM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
July 30, 2013
So there we are having a pleasant enough evening talking of this and that when this guy says you know, I want to go back home. His wife says, so go, I am not coming and he says, we have done 20 years, kids are settled, let’s relax now and she says, yo man, speak for yourself, I am staying put, I am settled.
And I am thinking there must be so many couples where the husband has done his stint and wants to lean back now and enjoy the end result, play a little golf, surround himself with family and kind of potter about, all passion spent.
But (and am I going to get my bottom kicked for this) it is a fair assessment, the wife doesn’t want to go back to the larger family. It is very much a middle class thing. She has nuclear family freedom, no relatives hassling her, no playing dutiful daughter-in- law for more than 10 days a year, wear what you want, go where you want, life is good, who wants all this retrace footsteps stuff.
Women have a certain liberty in expatland. They cherish it and many times the husband cannot fathom why they would be so churlish as to express horror at the option of returning.
Because she would lose her independence, her fiscal liquidity and her lifestyle, all of which the husband takes for granted because he doesn’t risk being swallowed up by dozens of her relatives.
You bring her to a cosmopolitan environment, are suddenly hep and modern and then you cannot figure out why she is dragging her heels about home sweet home.
I kind of get her point. Either you have to be very rich, getting old, unable to cope in which case the sign says move it otherwise the wife gets my vote…why rock the boat?
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
If my call is so important to them, why don’t they answer it for 22 minutes?
How come when I want to, but something specific online is the only item out of stock.
When I get into a queue or lane going fast, the moment I get in, it becomes the slowest and refuses to budge.
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