But before I go on to demean the desi kids, I’d like to tell you why exactly we turn out to be such clueless adults. 

It’s our parents. Yes, the same mummy and papa you call every time a life-threatening situation comes up, like how to pay the water bill or where to get gas from. 

Seems like a bitter truth? Well, it is still the truth.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that our parents are horrible. If anything, they’re exceptionally loving and giving people who have spoilt us with love. But let’s just say that it hasn’t really worked out in our favour.

Have you ever just sat down to wonder how your parents could do it all when they were your age but you fail miserably at the same things? 

You probably have, and well, we are all in the same boat. So, the reason they could do it all is because their parents raised them in a certain way. But our own upbringing has been quite different.

While our parents were burdened with difficulties from an early age, be it the maintenance of the house or earning for themselves, our parents planned on giving us a much privileged life. So no matter the means, they made sure that their darling children don’t have to work around as much. 

They sheltered us from all the difficulties. From things like waking up early to prepare our tiffins to getting our uniform ready by the time we get that one extra hour of sleep, they’ve done it all. Now, we don’t know what really goes behind getting things like food and clothes ready. We’ve never done it before. So, when we’re just pushed into doing it, without no knowledge of it whatsoever, how the hell do we do it? 

We’re at the mercy of the dhobi and we survive on Maggi, don’t we?

There are some things that we do learn over the years when we move out of the house. We find our own hacks around adulting. However, we still miss the kind of organisation that our parents did for us but we manage. Barely. But we do manage, somehow. 

But what about the administrative work? The bills, the taxes, the tax benefits, the filling of forms or even obtaining a DD from the bank? We barely know any of it.

It’s because mom and dad never let us do any of it. They were the adults and we were the kids. And they wanted to give their kids a rather relaxed environment. 

So they kept us away from all the adult stuff, the stuff we tend to run away from now, even when we ARE adults. And as much as we wish for it, we can’t be kids forever. We do need to take responsibility for ourselves.

All that love has also messed up our financial management.

You see, our parents often stretched themselves but saying a ‘no’ to us was something they avoided at all costs. They would save up for our summer camps or the clothes we wanted. They could have gone without it but not us. 

Now, we don’t know how to live without it. We don’t know how to say ‘no’ to ourselves. We have always gotten what we wanted and hence, whatever money we do have, we end up spending it. We’re not the generation that concentrates on saving anyway.

The fact that our loving parents have always kept us supplied means that they also gave us the freedom to do Ranbir Kapoor-esque things like finding ourselves, taking sabbaticals a year into working and basically, catering to our inner selves first. 

We don’t think long-term because our concerns have become too short term. So financial planning, asset-making or even career building isn’t really our first priority.

It’s made us dependent people who think they always have a falling net. When we finally move out of home, managing our existence becomes the very first task. We blame time and the process of growing up that has pushed us into apprehensive adulting. We crib about adulting without realizing that we should have started taking responsibility of ourselves a long time ago but we were too sheltered for that process. 

However, in the real world, you cannot run away from responsibility.

But the thing is that we’ve grown up looking at perfect adults. 

They’ve sacrificed, saved and planned for us. We need to live up to the love they’ve given us. We will always be their kids but in the real world, we need to start being like the adults we’ve seen growing up so that they can be proud of the kids they’ve raised.

But, hey, the good thing is that if you’ve realised this, you’ll probably accept the truth and then work towards being a better adult. We want to be like our parents and to become that, we need to be more vigilant, more planned and responsible adults.

And it shouldn’t be that difficult, folks, because our greatest examples are right in front of us. All we have to do is become like our parents.