Rewind to Childhood

In the shadow of a black-and-white screen.

-  Ranjit Singh

One of the benefits of the lockdown during Covid was reconnecting with my childhood as the responsibility of teaching the maid's daughter, Mehak, who is in class 2, fell on me.

While reading her EVS book on the structure of a family, I was quite amused to read about the difference between a nuclear family and a joint family. I was born in 1946 and five or six children in a family were quite common. A joint family, as illustrated in the textbook, had parents with two children and their grandparents making a total of six. Thus, the joint family of today (including the grandparents) was numerically about one or two members less than a normal family then!