WALKING IN MOTHER'S FOOTSTEPS

Picture taken in the lounge of Fernhills Palace,

a Welcome Heritage hotel, situated at Fernhill, Ooty,

the Nilgiris (Tamilnadu - INDIA). Circa 1986

WALKING IN MOTHER’S FOOTSTEPS

‘The child is the father of the man’

During my days in school we were given a line - a phrase or idiom - that we thought was a huge problem to analyse and fathom its true meaning. This was done after reading English Text or Poetry in class. Certain lines had to be underlined or highlighted as we read them. These would later be studied in detail to find the meaning of the subject phrases or idioms.

One question that invariably appeared in all tests and examinations went typically like this:
Explain with reference to the context: ‘The child is the father of the man’.
This line from William Wordsworth’s poem ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’ had always intrigued and perplexed me as a child. It has been interpreted in so many ways by so many. But as I see it today this phrase means a lot to me. It applies a lot to my own life and my children, albeit in a slightly different way from my wife’s point of view as well. In this case, for convenience, we could re-phrase the line: ‘The child is the mother of the woman’.

My eldest daughter has worked her way up in her career, walking in her mother’s footsteps in the accounting department. And to sum it all up, it is with extreme pride that today my wife works in the same firm as my daughter’s. The pinnacle of a mother’s joy is to see her daughter grow and become what she had always prayed and envisaged her to be, but the height of the crowning glory would be to watch and admire her daughter command and conduct a seminar in the same company.

Considering the fact that my wife’s major was accounting, then there must definitely be truth in the meaning and definition of the above phrase, that what we are when young, in many ways, eventually gives shape to what we become when we grow up.

I am no accountant, but in all confidence and pride, I can surely say that my daughter has picked up many of my artistic traits too. Hence there is so much truth in the phrase that we can safely surmise: ‘The child is the father of the man’.
Tony Fernandes