For most, our fathers were never the ones who said “I love you” every day. They were the ones who paid school fees on time, made sure there was food on the table and carried the weight of family responsibilities without talking about it. That is the thought entrepreneur and author Ankur Warikoo captured in a Father’s Day post that has struck a chord with thousands online.In the post shared on Friday, ahead of Father’s Day on June 21, Warikoo wrote that many fathers from an older generation rarely hugged their children, not because they lacked affection, but because they expressed love differently.” For most of us, our father rarely hugged us. Maybe he is a cold man. Most likely he is not,” he said.“And then one fine day, when we get our first job, our first car, our first lakh, our first house, our first gift for him — he put his hand on our shoulder and leave it there for 10 seconds. That is the hug,” he wrote.Warikoo ended the post with a message that many readers found particularly moving, “Our father may not have given you words. But he gave you everything except the words. When you become a father, just remember to add the words.”The post resonated because it reflected a familiar reality in many Indian households, where fathers often showed care through actions rather than emotional conversations. For Warikoo, however, the message is more than a general observation. It is rooted in his own experience growing up with his father, Ashok Warikoo.Over the years, Warikoo has spoken openly about the financial struggles his family faced and the lessons he learned by watching his father navigate them. Earlier this year, he described his father in a post that said:“Papa is a failure in the eyes of every finfluencer. But he is the baap of one!” he wrote.Warikoo admitted that his father made financial mistakes and that the family often lived closer to financial uncertainty than many people realised.“We weren’t poor. But we were an emergency away from having nothing,” he wrote.One of the stories he has shared dates back to 2003, when his parents, both 50 years old, decided to buy their first home after nearly two decades of living in rented houses. They purchased a house in Faridabad with the help of a housing loan. Just over a year later, his father lost his job.Finding work at that age was difficult, so he started a business. The venture struggled, and the family eventually found itself struggling to pay loan instalments.Warikoo recalled receiving a phone call from his father asking whether he had any money to spare. “Yes Papa, I have money right now,” he replied. According to Warikoo, he could hear relief in his father’s voice. “Thank you. Thank you so much,” his father said. The memory stayed with him for years. “In that moment, I hated money for what its scarcity had done to us,” he later wrote.The family had faced hardship even earlier. In another post, Warikoo recalled that his father lost his job in the mid-1990s, pushing the family into financial difficulties. There were periods when money was scarce, debts piled up and both parents made sacrifices to keep the household running.Yet when Warikoo looks back, he does not remember those years as a story about financial failure. Instead, he sees them as a lesson in persistence. “He taught me what it means to survive and persist. Forever grateful,” he wrote.That is perhaps why his latest Father’s Day message has resonated so widely. It is not a tribute to perfect fathers or flawless role models. It is a reminder that many fathers expressed love in ways that were easy to miss while growing up.They may not have been comfortable with hugs, emotional speeches or heartfelt conversations. But for many families, they showed up every day, worked through setbacks and quietly carried responsibilities that allowed their children to dream bigger lives.And sometimes, as Warikoo wrote, all that love was summed up in a hand resting on a shoulder for 10 silent seconds.
