Family - enablers or impediments?
Try joining your daddy's business and everyone will support you. Try saying you want to do your own thing and everyone will lose their minds.
Give up your boyfriend, toe the family line, pay and marry a boy of a high caste and everyone will dance at your wedding! Say you wont marry who they want and want to marry after 3 years, that too someone you love and everyone will come in to 'counsel' you!
Do an MBA from a top B-School and people will ask their kids to be like you! Dissent and say you want to become an artist and you will be abused for how useless and impractical you are!
Tolerate your husband's and in-laws' violence in all forms and keep smiling all the way through while being a child-rearing factory and everyone will claim to love you. Say enough is enough, ask for a divorce because you want to feel loved again, human again; and everyone including your own parents will call you rotten!
Families and choiceless/circumstantial relationships are the biggest and worst impediments in the growth of a person in India! Their fears, insecurities and frustrations at having given in themselves drive you to kill your dreams, desires, your whole personality and be just one of the many! Their lives go into maintaining what they consider a status quo, fully aware that the same people will abuse them in either case. Not because they have any right or authority to, but because they are bored, incapable and free and have created institutions such as religion, marriage and society so that they can get some authority because they wouldn't have gotten any otherwise!
They are the most scared lot ever! And it is therefore that they are bullies. They exploit you till you toe their line and the moment you step out, you are discarded, for they don't have the truth on their side, to be able to debate and yet stand firm! They have been able to 'follow' for they never asked and they know they won't have any answers if you did! Therefore, dissent is crushed! People haven't become intolerant today, they always were!
They will celebrate a Sachin Tendulkar or Shahrukh Khan or Narayana Murthy - all people who defied the norm and excelled in something of their choosing but they don't have the balls to become or to allow anyone to become the same!
Stop stopping yourself, let go of the pressure, of the morose existence, just let it all go! If you want a 'you' to thrive or even exist, get rid of 'them'! Pick a handful of family members and friends/associates who are aligned to you by agreement of thoughts and emotions and not by custom. You will have a fewer number of people around you and yes, every now and then you will feel a little lonely and depressed at the odd selfie you weren't in or the family gossip functions you weren't invited to or not having the huge 'friends groups' that keep meeting and splurging to temporarily feel less depressed about their lives; but in the long run, you shall be much happier, much more satiated and will do something in your life of great value, not just to yourself but to many others!