One Influential Advice

On my first day in college, while my father discussed with our hostel warden regarding the admission formalities and all, it seemed the warden already prepared a bundle of advice for parents. He advised my father not to worry much and assured him the hostel to be quite a decent one. The warden even said that most of the seniors were extremely supportive and he himself used to keep an eye on each and every student, although it was a different matter that we didn't have enough opportunities to make ourselves accessible within the range of his eyesight, well we rarely used to see him in the hostel campus during our ragging days. My father listened to him with full concentration and felt pretty relaxed with his  wonderful words. He even asked the warden if he could report my activities to him on a regular basis?

The warden said that he could very well update him on that, but he sounded little reluctant and said that usually the freshers wouldn't discuss anything with him. He tried to convince my father on how the freshers would become smarter, that too, within just a few weeks after they join hostel. Our warden said that he would do his best and a little later,  he made my father realize about his responsibilities as a parent. 

The warden said "but as a parent, even you also have some responsibilities. I would like to tell you one thing very frankly, it’s out here, where everyone would learn to smoke and would master their boozing skills. The students usually fool their parents and would ask them for extra money. They usually give a very good excuse of buying books and trust me, Engineering books are damn costly. But most of the students wouldn't buy more than one or two books. They would either borrow them from their seniors or share among their batch mates. Of course,  some of the guys would definitely buy a few books, but you need to be very careful and whenever they visit home during vacation, you must check all the books for which they asked money from you. You should never send  any extra money  to your kids out here."

The warden continued with his commendable advice's for almost an hour. Later that day, when few of the hostel seniors allotted room for us, we tried to settle our luggage's. My father was about to leave and I, along with few of my friends came outside the hostel gate to see him off. My father acted quite differently that moment and he looked little shy, as if he was about to say something. After those last minute gestures, we  left him near the hostel gate and were about to go upstairs to our room, but all of a sudden my father asked me to wait. With little discomfort, but very politely he asked me to show how much money I had in my wallet? As soon as I opened my wallet, he immediately grasped it and started to calmly count the money. He counted it twice and then he kept almost half of the money with himself and returned the remaining amount to me. I was totally blank and simply wondered "What the F?" I felt so weird and tried to justify him, but he immediately interrupted and said “It’s OK, if you are short of money, just call me and I would immediately send it to you." 

After listening to those influential advice from our very own warden, I opted to remain silent that moment. But fortunately it only had a short term influence on my father and things became pretty normal from the very next month.