Unsolicited Advice

When you hit your forties, you start feeling like you’ve seen it all - many summers and monsoons - and you (here, I mean I) begin giving advice and preaching almost instinctively.

Just today, for instance. After months of a break due to the [Covid] pandemic, our office has reopened. Today was a market visit day.
I was supposed to go with a salesman, who was in his thirties who had recently joined.

He was Tamil, and I, Marathi [2 regional state languages in India]. We got into the cab while on the way to the market and started chatting in our broken English as a common language, as best as we could.

The usual small talk followed - family members, is wife working, how many kids, whether they stay here or in the village, parents’ whereabouts, siblings, etc.

Then I asked him, “Where do you stay in Chennai, and is the house rented or your own?” He replied, “Sir, the house is rented.” (The preacher in me woke up.)

I said, “Try to buy a house, it makes things easier in the long run.” He responded, “Sir, I can’t manage both a home loan and a car loan.”

I thought [what an idiot], and said, “Why the rush to buy a car before a house? And such a fancy car, too! The money could’ve been used for a good down payment for a one-bedroom apartment in a place like Chennai.”

Now I had a point to make. So I started my lecture - ”You made a mistake buying a car. First, you should’ve bought a house, then a car in a few years,” and so on. He listened quietly and then started speaking.

He shared that back home, they barely had 4–5 acres of land, with the entire household dependent on farming. He had two sisters and himself. During years of drought, they had to survive on rationed rice.

His parents worked really hard. Things are somewhat better now, and got his sisters are married as well. 

As far as he remembers, his parents never once left the village. So he bought the car - just to take them out and around a bit. Every time he drives the car to the village, his father sits alone in the front seat. There’s a special kind of joy on his face. Sometimes, he even dozes off right there in the seat.

That last sentence made me pause internally.

The advisor in me was utterly defeated. People make decisions based on many factors, but we often see things from just one perspective and start giving advice.

In life, it’s good if things happen in order, but if you have to break that order for the happiness of your loved ones, there’s no harm in it.

I decided - no more unsolicited advice from today.