I was speaking to someone about the kind of issues we often have with our parents and chanced upon an expression of the problem that I had not used earlier.

"I think my father has trouble dealing with the fact that I am not him," I said.

My friend agreed. I feel a lot of people would agree. I think we all realise what the issue is. It has to do with the impulse behind reproduction and the drive behind parenthood.

Why do people have children?

At first glance, it is a biological impulse that is programmed into us through millions of years of evolution. At second glance, it acquires, for lack of a better phrase, a cultural flavour. We spend time on our offspring, we teach them things, we try to make them into something resembling us.

Parenthood, it seems to me, is an extended cloning process. It is also a rather inefficient cloning process. The base material -- the new being -- isn't a clean slate. It comes into this world rather soiled with preferences and personality.

It is not a clean sheet of paper on which the parent can write anything they like. They have to make do with writing on whatever space they can find. There is a lot of it in the beginning, but it shrinks with time and with life. The sheet gets stained and tears. Sometimes, the pressure of the parent's pen causes new tears. Sometimes, ink spills and leaves stains that will not wash off for life. Over time, the sheet yellows.

As babies, we are absorbent. We pick up ideas and instructions and information like an eager sponge in the sea of life. Since parents are most of this sea for us as children, their imprint on us is indelible. They feel happy because they are able to see themselves in us. They try to make us more like them, going so far as to even attempt making us what they could never be. As sponges, we do turn every shade of the colour of the water that they are. But eventually, we drift into other waters and emerge a multicolour mess that does not resemble our parents and causes them pain.

Every time I hear from someone about the need to carry on the vansh, the family name, the line stretching all the way back to someone I have never seen, never heard, and don't know of as anything other than an abstraction, I wonder whether it is really about that long removed ancestor of mine. The answer lies perhaps in the other direction, in my need to deal with the fact that I will not exist forever.

We make copies of ourselves in hopes of defeating death, only to discover that death will not have it and that the copy we made has become something else altogether.