Leaving Home

Director Mira Nair in an interview on NPR while discussing The Namesake:

“As children, as callow adolescents, we always believe that we are the ones who’ve invented love – that our parents have nothing to do with what we are feeling at the moment. And, of course, our parents have gone through that and so much more. I felt very much that it’s only when I became a parent that I understood what I put my parents through. And so, my version of the namesake is much more about that thread, about that bond, and the refuge of family. And that is something that we all are, whether we are parent or child, we understand that thread and sometimes, as young people, we choose to ignore it."

A good reminder of our parents being wiser than we give them credit for.

I wasn't as self-indulgent to assume that I "invented love." I had a few bouts of teenage angst, which subsided pretty quickly. Angst, at that age, is funny to me, then and now. I was pretty self-aware. I don't tend to think my problems are the biggest problems. I'll give my parents credit for this. They somehow instilled within me a sense of guilt at an early age. I don't even know how they did it. I think it wasn't conscious but rather purely circumstantial. They never sat me down and implemented a lesson plan to get me to become self-aware and feel guilt. But rather it was the circumstantial stuff - by virtue of their immigration, seeing their struggle with the language, seeing how they act in unfamiliar situations- that made me see my heroes in vulnerable ways and, ultimately, made me feel guilt.

But that was my perspective. I wondered what the ruminations and actions and decisions of someone who was developing his identity looked like from their perspective.

(Just got off the phone with mom and dad.) We talked about my first nintendo system. Mom said that I had told them all my friends at school had one. She said around that time it was pretty expensive - "more than a hundred dollars." Classic mom. Defnitely worried about our family's financials at the time, of course, she would remember its relative cost. Especially compared to the slinky she somehow convinced me to get instead of a Transformers action figure for reading 30 books one summer (That's another story), a $100+ nintendo system was probably akin to getting me a trans-am at the time.

My dad said I was really cute about it. He said I had asked for one and then almost immediately had mentally girded myself against not getting one. I had rationalized myself out of wanting one, he said. So when we went to Kmart a few weeks later and when he told me I could get a nintendo system, I initially erupted in joy. Then I felt guilty and started making all these academic achievement promises. Apparently, I didn't feel guilty enough to let go of the box and check out the slinkies. He said he was getting a little misty-eyed thinking about it. Classic dad.

When a big nintendo box drops from the sky, you catch it.






If you catch it with two hands, the catch starts looking like a hug
long after the catch is seemingly over.




Take the catch away, and there will be
wailing and gnashing of teeth of biblical proportions.