How I Found Common Ground With My Immigrant Dad on a Tennis Court

An electrical engineer by trade, Shyamal’s idea of a fun night was memorizing the periodic table, which would make perfect sense if you could see him hunched over the kitchen table in his thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He has always been an academic, wowed by calculus and physics, rather than dunks and home runs. The idea of playing catch with me was foreign to him. Shyamal didn’t know the basic rules of, well, any sport, except maybe soccer, which he played some growing up, and cricket, which is as essential to living life in India as oxygen. Like many South Asian parents of his generation living in the United States, his focus was on survival and trying to get to the next day. On behalf of their children, it was on professional and scholastic pursuits. Anything else was a distraction.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/sports/tennis/tennis-immigrant-india-parenting.html