This silly little essay would have been right on the money back in my time when I was a kid growing up in India. There really was no pleasing your middle-class Indian parent no matter what kind of child you were. No one had heard or known of a parent that was content with their kids no matter how exemplar they were. There was always something missing. Socially it was the right signal to send out - that sense of discontent with your progeny, the hand-wringing over their lack of perfection and such. On the rare occasion one might run into a parent who was oddly braggadocious about their kid.
People held a pretty dim view of such parents and it was generally understood that their kids would end up being hugely problematic, they were indeed the object of pity for having such inept parents. The decorous and proper thing was to complain about the kids, find fault with them in private and public, keep the pressure on for improved performance. Interesting to see that little has changed with the passage of time. The middle-class Indian parent is still who they used to in my time and for generations before that I suppose.
Reading this reminded me of my friend C's mother. This was the only woman I knew that was genuinely proud of her kid and unafraid to express her support. They were very much a middle-class family but aspired to be better than that some day. C was allowed to pursue her dream of being a baker - instead of becoming and engineer or a doctor. The other parents whispered about C's dad not being a leader of the family and not reigning in his crazy wife. C has made the cover of baking magazines as it turns out - so the mother was quite far from delusional and maybe the father was smart enough to see that and kept out of the way. There are always some parents like that and their middle-class Indian kids come out the real winners.
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