Family ties under strain

This refers to a purposeful editorial, "The crumbling family: Elderly pay dearly for breakdown" (May 23). It is shocking to know that even a former 85-year-old Chief Justice is forced to move the Punjab and Haryana High Court to restrain his son from harassing him and his wife.
It is really tragic that in the present-day concrete jungles of our urban centres, even family relations seem to be under an unprecedented strain. The most reliable and delicate filial ties between parents and children also seem to be drying up fast. The children use parents as stepping stones to their successful careers and then dump them to die in utter isolation and frustrations.
The emerging fatal crack-up in family life is quite disappointing as it can seriously hamper the growth of a healthy civil society around us with sensible, courteous and civilised citizens as its responsible members. In fact, in the busy urban centres, we spend our entire lives in gathering all the comforts and luxuries of life for our children whom we wish to make "big, rich and powerful" at any cost and this blind pursuit for higher social status leaves us with little time to help our children in nurturing rich human emotions like love, co-operation,kindness and patriotism etc.
Even within the family life, gross opportunism has come to disturb and shock us beyond description, rendering all blood ties hollow, shallow and meaningless. Most of us are becoming emotionally barren, culturally uprooted and commercially motivated. We have miserably failed to teach our children to respect family ties. In our hunt for material growth, we have come to sacrifice our spiritual growth. It is quite dangerous.
Dr RAJ BAHADUR YADAV, Fatehabad