Something I found scribbled in a notepad from a couple of months back..
I moved into a new apartment yesterday and eagerly waited for 'my' belongings to arrive. And when they did, the house finally felt like home. What came out of the boxes were my favorite shoes, some jackets I love, my dear scarves, pretty crockeries and the most vital posessions - my books. While everything started slowly fitting in into its own private space, the books sat around everywhere not knowing where to go. The apartment has no book shelves. After much thought and speculation, I decided to place them on the dinning table till I bought myself a book shelf. 'Whenever do I use the dinning table anyway.'
And this triggered the thought. Really, when do I use the dinning table. I eat either glued to my TV or my laptop. And the rushed meals are in the kitchen itself. The cons of living alone. Othewise the dinning table has or at least used to have a special significance in a family. The one place, where all family members would come together.
Dinning table conversations ranged through a variety of topics. The days updates, news, neighbors and gossips, school results, a lot of old days stories and often the dinning table is where parents impart values to their children. They talk about their parents and what they learnt from them. They talk about the world and where it went wrong. They talk about what they do differently. And every story has a moral. The morals that children vow to remember, teenagers mock at in their heads and adults are confused about. Irrespective the conversations are held.
Yet another way in which the dinning table illustrates its significance, is by defining the family heirarchy. The head of the family takes the single chair side of the dinning table. And for the rest, the elder one is, the closer he or she is seated to the head of the family. Interestingly, if someone above the head of the family in the extended family hierarchy visits, he takes the head-of-family-seat. There is no other part of a house that explicitly displays these family hierarchies.
Lastly, the dinning table offers that great opportunity for women to display their crockeries and admire them while the rest of the family admires the food. In homes where food is not directly served from the kitchen, women use another set of dishes and hence get to shop for them too. Whereas I like to gift the prettiest crockeries I come across to my mom for use back home rather than keeping them in this new apartment, where the dinning table will soon turn into a study space.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
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