We’ve all ‘played house’ in our childhood. Some form of it. Whether we were rich or poor, lived here or there, alone or in the company of siblings and friends. It was what we did during playtime, or on weekends and holidays and vacations.

As a young boy, one doesn’t automatically gravitate to ‘playing house’ … I don’t know why; ask the experts! … but if in the company of little girls your age, you get drawn into the make-believe.

I was.

I had two younger siblings in my early years, both girls. I tended to scoff at their ‘girlie’ games but when my cousins visited from the nearby city of Ranchi (then still part of the undivided state of Bihar), both of them girls of my age, I would get jealous when the four got together and played on their own. Isolated and outnumbered, I would turn myself into a pest until they had no choice but to invite me into their world.

Roles would be assigned by Rani, the eldest in the group. Mummy, Daddy, baby, brother, sister, sometimes even a servant. Though I do remember that no one wanted to be a servant and had to be coaxed (or threatened) into doing it, even if it was for a short while.

Invariably, I mostly got to play Daddy.

We played our roles in accordance with our real-life experiences at our respective homes. So, I would be required to be loving and caring, the one with authority and the go-to if there was conflict (imagined or real). In desperate situations, I would be side-lined while the girls sorted out things amongst themselves. I learned very quickly that being Daddy did not really bring any power, only an opportunity to be gruff or pretend to be wise. More often than not, I had simply to hold the baby while the others went about with their ‘chores’.

The game would break up when we were summoned at mealtime … or when there was a revolt by one or more of the actors who could no longer stand the ‘bossing’ by another or the ‘ganging up’ of two or more of the group.

Of course, the manner in which each one behaved and/or played his or her assigned role was determined by our personal experiences at home and how each one perceived them stereotypically. That’s how conflicts erupted between us.

”This is how Dad does it,” I would plead.

“No, he doesn’t. That’s Mum’s job!” would be the response.

Or: “That’s not how we do it in my home!”

Thus, we couldn’t escape our upbringings or the separate perspectives that each one of us had, shaped of course by our respective life-long experiences. [True, at that point each had a total of 4 to 6 years of immersion and exposure.] We were, simply, products of what had gone on around us until then in our separate lives and there was no going against what we knew to be right or wrong, good or bad.

I’ve been thinking of those days a lot these days, now that I’m no longer tied to inane duties and responsibilities that come with fatuous preoccupations such as work and career.

And have been surprised by the realization that we … you and I and everyone else … have never really stopped playing house, no matter how old we have become, what we do, or where we live or work or gambol. I look around me and I now see that we’re playing house, regardless of how deftly we camouflage our busy-nesses with pretensions and ostentations, apologias and justifications, titles and costumes.

Let’s take lawyers for example. I know the profession well … I was part of it, both as a trainee and as a practitioner, for a quarter of a century.

They receive rigorous training for years … in my view, more liberal and mind-opening than any other! Their responsibilities are lofty, the oaths they take and the commitments they make are mind-blowing in their seriousness. I’ve worked with the best of them and the worst of them, and the whole dramatis personae between the two extremes. Now that I think of it, with the benefit of a lifetime of hindsight, they’re all playing house.

They are human and therefore shaped more thoroughly and completely by the matrix of their upbringings … their childhoods, their families, their histories, their separate and collective hopes and struggles, their closets of triumphs and failures, the truckloads of beliefs and moraes they’ve inherited … their entire environments, actually!

So, despite the best education and the purest of inspirations to guide them, the choices they make, the decisions they arrive at, the paths they choose for themselves as well as on behalf of those they are required to serve, everything is influenced and shaped by who they are as individuals and what they bring from their past, both on the conscious and subconscious level.

As a result, no two lawyers are the same. Each, despite the enormity and impact of everything they do, is guided by who they intrinsically are … which, ultimately, boils down to being human, flawed and imperfect. Thus, who you get as a lawyer, no matter how diligent you are, is a crap shoot. Even when you get the best of them … and there are some very good ones out there … they have their good moments and the bad. Because they’re playing their roles … never fulfilling them.

It’s not just lawyers … I just started with them as an example.

Same goes with doctors. Engineers. Technocrats. Police. Educators. Scientists. The clergy, no matter which religion you look at. Politicians. Bureaucrats. Corporate leaders. The judiciary. The ultra-rich. The workers who toil in every area of life. And ah yes, the experts. You tell me what expertise you need to back you up and what you want said, and I’ll find you one in a jiffy … with credentials that will dazzle even the Nobel committee. There’s no aspect in life today, I submit, where you can find anyone that you can fully trust and rely on to do his/her honest best. Truly.

Do you genuinely think your town or city is being run the way it should be by generously compensated professionals? Your province or state? Your country? Any country? Any international or multi-national institutions?

There are no exceptions, I’m afraid. They are all playing house. Very seriously, very intensely … but willy nilly.

Don’t take my word. Look around you. Pick any one in the news or in your own life. Sitting in your armchair in the comfort of your living room, don’t you think things could be better? Whether you yourself can or not is another matter … the fact that the one in or with power, with a mandate and responsibility, the one who draws a salary and the one who has taken an oath to carry out duties within assigned road-maps and parameters, the fact that he or she is dropping the ball over and over again, there’s the rub!

More often than, at great cost and harm to others.

We’re all playing house at best. Those with expert training and designations, and those with little or none, they’re all no better than amateurs. Led by their noses and biases, prejudices, chips on their shoulders. And then, there’s greed, envy, anger, lust, pride and an ever-growing list of untrammeled pathologies.

For me, the memory of that scene of children playing house explains it all. We never grow up or out of our infantile behaviours – even when we learn to pose as adults and are able to get by as grown-ups.

Once we accept this existential fact of life as a universal failing, it is not difficult to live with it.

It’s life as we know it.

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