What are you entitled to?

Here's the thing about indian people...at least indian people of my parents' generation...they have a huge sense of entitlement. The elders believe they are entitled to respect automatically because they are old and have "seen a lot of things". The parents believe they are entitled to a lifetime of worship from their children because they bestowed the great gift of life upon them and raised them. Siblings believe they are entitled to meddle in each other's lives because they share the same blood line.

I know this sense of entitlement is not unique to indian people but is perhaps just a bit more pervasive in their race. I am completely baffled by this concept. How can you have such a deep rooted sense of entitlement based on something like age or blood line? I believe that entitlement is earned...and even then I hardly feel any sense of entitlement. I believe that everything in my life is a blessing....even if I did earn it...it is still a blessing...not an entitlement. No one owes me anything....I owe everything to God, to destiny.

This phenomenon becomes even more complex in the indian culture because people who have unsuccessful or unhappy lives due to a myraid of reasons...circumstantial or consequences of bad decision making, still have this sense of entitlement. Essentially they seem to believe that regardless of their screw ups, they should be respected, adhered to and worshipped. In fact, if your life is in any way shape or form better than what theirs was, you owe it to them to include them in your success. If they had a bad marriage, you should feel sorry for them and try to now make up for the shitty spouse. If they were unable to be financially successful because they chose to gallavant around aimlessly when they should have been studying, it is now incumbent upon the younger generation (including not only their own children but nephews, neices and all distant relatives) to provide them the lifestyle they could have achieved by focusing on those little things like education. If they hold views entirely different than yours, you should not voice your disagreement because they are older than you and therefore command such respect regardless of the fact that age is the only thing they have to rely on as a source of this respect because judging them from their own lifestyle certainly would not lend itself to the honor of respect.

How does this make any sense? If you screwed up in your life, I may feel sorry for you...I might try to do some nice things for you but why do I owe you something when you played an active role in making your life what it is today? Sure, adults in my life have contributed to who and what I am today and my overrall success. But, they have also contributed to my failures and potential failures. What are they doing to make up for that? Do they realize that their actions could have resulted in making me a failure as well...and still might in the future?

I have seen this in countless Indian families and it insults my innate sense of fairness and justice. Am I being too harsh? Am I too cocky because life hasn't dealt me any major setbacks yet and I don't know what its like to be in their shoes? Maybe when you become so unhappy, so discouraged with life...you can't think reasonably any more....all you want is someone to make it all better.

I know that my life could go all wrong in the blink of an eye. But, I am not going to count on others after me to make up for what happened to my life. Whenever I have gone through my rough patches, I have never felt that someone else needs to make it all better for me. In the same token, a lot of my rough patches can actually be attributed to the actions of the adults in my life. Yet, I never felt they owed me something for it...never blamed them for their mistakes. I simply loved them and stuck by them. That's what I feel they were entitled to as my family, my friends.