Tag: parents

  • No kidding

    The debate on twitter, some time back, on the subject of kids on Junior MasterChef Australia was an interesting one to watch. I have no definitive opinion on it, and I understand that it can be debated both ways. So, just a few perspectives.

    I watched the show for a few days, and was amazed by the skill displayed by the kids. I also found the judges being very careful with their words. (they can be scathing as the ‘regular’ MasterChef show would prove) The kids seemed to be having fun. I don’t know if the elimination grind got to them. I don’t know how the entire experience would affect them – irrespective of them being winners or losers.

    What I do think is that in many ways, the show is preparing these kids for the world – for making choices, (I’m reasonably sure none of them have been forced to come here) chasing a passion, the consequences – winning and losing, fame and despair, public scrutiny and the loss of privacy, dealing with judgments passed by others and so on. And that goes for all sorts of reality shows – dance shows with scantily clad kids included. Any opinion I have against dance shows is a judgment based on my baggage, and objectively, I can’t be sure that dancing (of any kind in any attire) < cooking. I could be flawed in my rationale, but that’s like saying Vidya Balan’s performance in The Dirty Picture is somehow lesser than Sanjeev Kapoor’s erm, Dal Makhani.

    I am not a parent, so I can only talk from the perspective of a child that I once was. 🙂 We didn’t have reality television then, but we had non televised competitions, and I have been a participant. Music, debate, hockey, quizzing, cricket, dumb charades – I’ve represented  my school/college in all of these. I was lucky enough to be encouraged in most of these (very few got the point of Dumb C 🙂 ) by my parents and teachers. I can only dimly imagine the sacrifices my parents might have made for letting me pursue these and my other indulgences – voracious reading, for example. 🙂

    I do believe that most parents want the best for their children, though the way they show it could be seen and judged in different ways. Parents have no inkling of what the world will become, though they pretend to. They make choices based on their experiences, their perspectives of the future, and their desires for their children. I have a choice to make now too – I could blame my parents for not making me focus completely on studies. (for example) Who knows, I might have gotten in and out of an IIT/M and might have finally written a book. 😉 Or I could be thankful for the choices they made for me, and for the experiences that gave me. I, for one,  am indeed thankful, and think that these paths gave me valuable perspectives – with regards to all the ‘preparation for the world’ points I had listed earlier. There can be no A/B testing for all this, you realise. 🙂

    The fun part is that somewhere along the way, I started writing a bit. This blog has been around for more than 9 years, I write 2 newspaper columns. I haven’t been trained for any of this. Whether the story has a fairy tale ending is completely subjective and dependent on many factors that are beyond the parents’ or the child’s control, or imagination. The parents and the children are living some great moments. Perhaps that’s all there is to it.

    until next time, show stopper

  • Parenthesis

    Sometime back, I saw this relatively unknown Malayalam movie called ‘Calendar’, starring Zareena Wahab, playing mother to Navya Nair. Zareena’s character is widowed at 21 and she refuses to remarry since she wants to give all her attention to her child. The movie worked for me, despite it being built on the cliched “kid grows up, and gives more importance to her own life than her parent’s feelings”, thanks to a tight script and some neat casting.

    On the day I’m writing this, 3 works – one news item, one article, and one short story – appeared in my reading stream. The news was about a 107 year old woman left by her children, one of whom stays nearby, to fend for herself in a cowshed, the article centred around the topic of divorce and its impact on children, and the fiction work had to do more with marriage and infidelity, but with a neat twist in the end. Speaking of the end, I will link to them there, so you don’t escape this early. 😉

    I really didn’t need these prompts to write on the subject, since parenthood has been a source of constant debate recently, thanks to our parents aging and showing the first signs of serious aches and pains, even as we grow older and realise that the body also believes in keeping a low temperature of revenge for sins committed on it during the last three decades. 🙂

    Parenthood is one of those things that seriously lacks an undo feature, just like death, and is hence treated as a decision that merits serious thought. In general, the parents want the child to have a happy life and make choices on its behalf. Choices the child may not like/appreciate, but the parents believe to be the right one. They also make sacrifices for the child, in terms of time, money, and so on.

    But at least for debate’s sake, do you think these acts are always completely selfless? Isn’t brewing underneath it all a set of expectations? Sometimes parents see children as a way of fulfilling their own aspirations, sometimes they see them as support mechanisms in old age. Even if it’s none of these, or others you can think of, they at least get some pleasure out of seeing their child do well in life.

    But what blows me has always been that the parents get to make this considered choice of having a child and the child who is brought into the world and is the recipient of this and later choices, has zero say in the matter. It’s a serious product design flaw, and the only non-utopian remedy is for everyone concerned not to take each other for granted.

    As promised, the news, the article and the story.

    until next time, apparent traps

  • Decision Faker

    Of all the books I’ve recently  read, one I liked immensely was Thrity Umrigar’s “First Darling of the Morning”. Some of it had to do with her wonderful articulation of the pop culture phenomena close to my generation, some of it had to do with her personal traits, which I could identify with (“The more silent and introspective I grew from the inside, the more smart-alecky and verbal I felt compelled to be“), and a lot of it had to do with her honest portrayal of human relationships – their gray areas, their changing nature with time, and many such nuances. Will put up a review here soon.

    One of the things that made me think was this

    And finally, I know that the world still belongs to the adults, and although, in their kindness and mercy they may pretend to share it with us, ultimately it is still their world. It is they who decide when we are old enough to stop playing with dolls, when we should give away toys that they’ve decided we’ve outgrown……”

    I tried to think back to the first decision I had ever gotten to make by myself, but I couldn’t think that far back.  I remembered the days in engineering college – love, politics, future plans, all of which were perhaps my decisions. I also remember getting back from GIM and feeling exactly the way the author describes her last days in college.

    I am nowhere close to being ready to be anything but a college student. The world suddenly feels too big a place for me to navigate.

    And then it dawned on me, that however much I’d like to think that decisions are my own, they perhaps aren’t. There’s always a set of people who play a role in the decisions, directly or indirectly, influencing the outcome. But the decisions are made, for better, or worse. In her acknowledgment, the author uses a phrase “Thank God we don’t get what we deserve in life”.

    When i see ‘kids’ these days, this one for example, or N, and the seeming ease with which they take decisions and handle themselves, I wonder if its a generation thing or a personality thing. Even at this age, there are days when, just before I sleep, I wish I could go back to those times, when by the time I got up, my parents/ grandmother would have fixed the mammoth problem that had seemed so future-threatening to me the night before. These days, I wonder if they ever felt all grown up and in control, or were they just pretending, like I do  many a time now.

    until next time, deservedly so.

  • Fantasia

    And while I did not have any imaginary friends, at least not any I can remember, the other day, when I was discussing Calvin and my penchant for quoting from the series, with a friend, who is an even better fan, since she can quote exact lines, while I sometimes tend to paraphrase, I suddenly seemed to be overwhelmed by a few memories from my childhood. Its like they were always there – the memories, and were just waiting for a context – in this case, Calvin’s super identities, to take me back to a fantasy world, utterly devoid of logic, but probably more fun than anything that followed.

    Now we’re back to the beginning
    It’s just a feeling and no one knows yet

    You might remember the Rambo fixation that I’d written about sometime back, the ‘superheroes’ who’re about to be revealed existed around the same time. The Rambo gear wasted away in batches, and so spawned a couple of mutant characters, which were war heroes too, but equipped with a different set of weapons. There was this Leo Mattel gun, that produced a roaring noise, until certain experiments with new, freely available ammunition (sand) silenced it forever. The second generation weaponry consisted of water guns which turned out to be very trigger happy by themselves.It didn’t help that they were usually loaded and since they used the loops of trousers as holsters, they tended to throw aspersions on the hero’s character – that he was still wetting his pants at that age!!

    I know some of you would remember the animated Spiderman series that was sponsored by Rasna. At one point, Rasna gave away free spiderman masks and my tale is eerily similar to Calvin gulping down chocolate frosted sugar bombs to get the beanie. Only in my case, it was kept safely until I finished that Rasna box. Since my love for superheroes wasn’t shared by the rest of the family, i couldn’t coax them into buying me the entire costume, which I remember seeing on a mannequin in Parthas, cochin. 🙂 So I made by own er, costume. There had to be a spider logo on the chest, but since I couldn’t get myself or anyone else to kill a spider, I used a small rubber octopus from an earlier era, tied to the chest with a string. Since I found my costume woefully inadequate, I made myself wrist and ankle guards with bajaj bulb covers, and completed the ensemble with my mom’s stitching thread, bunches of which disappeared regularly and reappeared on window sills, like those ‘mannat’ threads in temple trees. A super hero never cries, even if he gets thrashed. Since the real world identity was that of a photographer, this one was the only superhero to be snapped. No, its not going to be shared :p

    But just because they can’t feel it too
    Doesn’t mean that you have to forget

    He Man was the next to be created, I wonder if any of you remember the tiny comics that used to come in batches of four. Anyway, this costume was made with the liberal use of notebook paper and tape, with Dad’s permanent markers used to make the bold cross at the centre of the chest guard and a carved coconut branch for the sword. The neighbourhood cat was usually scared out its peaceful afternoon snooze by a branch wielding kid, poking at it with the branch/sword and willing it to become Battle Cat. It was soon discovered that attacks against He Man were considerably lesser if old newspapers were used instead of new notebook pages. The Masters in He Man’s universe tended to be evil and soon, even the newspaper supply stopped.

    ‘Film Man’ had to be the only original one in the series. One fine day, the drawer containing old film reels was discovered. It was also discovered that they tended to loop back when thrown onto say a window rod. They also made excellent wrist gear and even a goggle, though it did mean the superhero had to have a permanently upraised chin in order to be able to view his surroundings. Unlike films in general, this one didn’t have a happy ending, since many of those reels were important!!

    I’m sure may of you would have stories like these. Those were times of innocence, when super heroes seemed real, and life was an adventure waiting to happen. In spite of the thrashings that the super hero got, he was also comfortable in the knowledge that his parents were real super heroes who could solve every one of his problems, however large they seemed to him. And then he grew up…. reality happened, and suddenly, all he seemed to have were memories…

    Let your memories grow stronger and stronger
    ‘Til they’re before your eyes
    You’ll come back
    When they call you
    No need to say goodbye

    until next time, origins and sequels 🙂

    The song is one of my favourites. The Call,  by Regina Spektor from the soundtrack of “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian”

  • Value for money

    A term that is bandied about a lot these days, especially since we live in an era of consumer monsters, who insist on getting every paise’s worth. But i remember the time when two of the words were used differently, and remember the generation which worked hard to make us understand the value of money. That generation lived most of their life before liberalisation, and are yet to come to terms with the plethora of choices that are now on offer.

    It hit me a few days back, when I was sitting in a desserts joint working my way through a chocolate mound, and saw a man, perhaps in his early sixties looking into the shop, and for a fleeting second, at me. The melancholic look said it all. The look of a man, who has perhaps spent an entire working life making sure that his family was well provided for, that his kids got a good education, and they had a home they could call their own, and while doing all these, mostly missed out on things that he’d like to have done.

    And now, when the kids are all grown up, and he finally has the time, he realises the world has changed, and the value of money has been drastically altered, and that the plans he might have made are rendered useless, thanks to the prices and the amount of people who are capable of and willing to pay a premium for the same services. People, like his own children, who work hard to make sure they earn enough to pay the premium, and end up not having enough time for the people who kickstarted their lives.

    Long ago, when he gave up that new shirt piece, so that his child could have a new toy, could he have imagined that one day, his child could buy shirts from brands he thought would never see in India, but not have time to remember the toy his father had once bought for him? Could he have imagined this was the way it would all turn out to be? And after he looks at me through the window that separates our worlds, i look at myself, and wonder whether it’ll all work out the way we plan, or will we also be unable to comprehend the lives we bring out into the world?


    until next time, values