114. Being Visible

Class Teaching (Family Management, Paper IV – Family Politics)

Teacher: “You will never be a good player at family politics, if your visibility is low. You might have your job and your friends and a thousand other things, but if you want to have a central role in your extended family, you must make yourself visible.

“How to increase visibility in the family? I will give you a few tips.

“Attend family gatherings and stay back till late. Do not come early and make the host serve you drinks and snacks earlier than planned, but stay back to show you are one of the near and dear ones. Always insist on eating at the very end with the members of the host family. Most of the food might get over by then, so make sure to eat some surreptitiously during the evening.

“If you cannot attend physically, make arrangements with someone so that you can make a video call and talk to everyone. Make a second video call near the end to talk to the host family members.

“Next, visit people in hospitals. Try to visit on weekend evenings when many other relatives will be visiting. Your service might not be needed at that time, but everybody will see you.

“In case you have to visit in some odd morning hours, make sure to take photos and send to everybody in the family.

“If you are good with photo editing tools, then make collages of you surrounded by as many family members as possible. If you are not good with photo editing tools, then ask someone from the family to teach you. Share these collages.

“Keep planning family trips. Promise to handle a lot of arrangements yourselves and include as many people in the trip as possible. The more the number of people, the more difficult it will be to fix a common time and place for a trip. So you will not finally have to do anything or go anywhere. But plan with vigour and gusto.

“Play with children whenever you visit someone. Children remember people far better than adults. If you can win their hearts they will keep asking their parents about you whenever someone visits their house. That way, your name will come up even if other people are visiting them. Very useful.

“Make sure to go the crematorium when someone dies. Do not go the house first. Say you are busy and will go directly to the crematorium. Then keep calling people every five minutes to ask about the status and progress of the hearse van. Do not call the same person, call as many different family members as possible.

“A good way to remind people of your existence is to share the Facebook memory posts. Take photos with family members regularly and post everything on Facebook. This way you will create a lot of memory posts every year. Share and comment on each when they appear.

“If you follow the above for about one year, you will see a radical change in your visibility index. You will also see that none of the above is difficult, except maybe interacting with children.

“Remember, children have an uncanny ability to see through people’s intensions. You do not want them to feel you have some ulterior motives. Just be careful, that is all.”