Nuclear is Unclear

I had the good fortune to have been to a friends wedding a few weeks back. This was my very first experince of a 'North Indian wedding' and it was a great one at that. But I guess all the dancing, playful flirting and the simple fact that people were having fun at a wedding was a bit too much for someone like me to fathom!

Coming from down south, weddings have always come across as an unavoidable nuisance to me. I had unfailingly made grand elaborate plans on how to fall sick on a wedding day just to avoid being forced to sit and watch the most sombre show on earth. I must add that almost everyone i know tends to agree that South Indian weddings are more like a funeral than a joyous occasion. The only part of the wedding i remotely liked was the food. And a mute lamb at a slaughter house would be making more noise than what the groom/bride would make at the pandal! I simply just had to compare the poor lamb to them. Evil me.

Now coming back to the topic, well this wedding i had been to had a joint family system in place. That was another first for me. Having lived in an isolated nuclear family i've never known the joy of having cousins around. It was a pleasant experience i must say. In this new age there might be instances where a joint family can work. But nowadays a joint family would be an exception rather than the norm. On the contrary i see the concept of a nuclear family breaking down to an individual level. I can foresee a family of four spread across four corners of the globe.

In such a case the only way the family can communicate would be by a conference call! Now i dont think thats over the top. Its not too long before companies would start offering conference calls for such families! So mom, dad and the kids could all dial in from their own phones. Talk about globalization! Our lives would be a series of calls. Calls at work or client calls followed by family calls. One after another till we recieve the 'final call'. Some bright guy will, i am sure, come up with an idea to implant some communication device right into a child when it is born. that would save us a lot of trouble i am sure. But then with an antenna sticking out of your head i guess you would also resemble those martian kind of things.

I am not really sure if we are leading in the right direction or if this is for the good or bad but i am pretty sure that for me the more nu-clear we get, the more un-clear it gets.