Family time

Last week I had an occasion to re-visit my childhood again & this happened without any attempt to regress myself. To make matters clear, after about 30 years, I landed up sitting and playing a board game of 'Monopoly'. I'm sure that most of you have also played this board game in your own childhood. To dredge up some old memories, the game starts off with you having a fortune in paper money & then buying up cities & then constructing houses or hotels there. It used to be the first glimpse of the future world of commerce albeit on a grand scale. You would earn by charging rent to the other players who would land up in your city and vice-versa. The game also introduced us to the concept of having 'working capital', putting up your property as collateral for loans and also the concept of 'bankruptcy'. So even if most of us did not manage to experience these things later in life, we all enjoyed the game especially when one was winning. Along-with the times, the game now does not have paper money, but smart cards which store your bank balance.

This article is not to talk about the game itself, but the value addition it provided in terms of 'quality family time' together. My sons convinced me, my wife & my mother to join them in playing the game. The best part of the process was that we landed up spending around 3 hours together, which is something which would not have happened in the last 8-10 years. 3 generations of a family engrossed in trying to become business tycoons & trying to bankrupt each other was more fun than I had envisaged. The older 2 generations went through the initial learning process where my sons had to re-educate us on all the rules of play, but later even my mother could teach her grand-children some rules of negotiation & collaboration. In today's context spending 3 hours together fully engaged with each other is an excellent achievement & I am disappointed that I have not been able to identify such a simple opportunity earlier.

The objective of this blog post is to share this insight & encourage you to also seek such 'Quality Family time' moments. While this game caught the fancy of all the family members the first time, I'm sure that everyone relished the time spent together & would look forward to doing so again. Repetition can breed boredom and therefore one need not do this very frequently & at the same time look at other options which might serve the same purpose. After all the biggest gift that one can provide to our parents is the gift of 'time spent together'.