The Boy on the Burning Deck

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Uncle OT or The Visitor as he's known to some, sent me this link
to a news article from The Guardian and asked me if I could do a post on what I thought of the subject. Looks like he's been mailing other bloggers, too! (I get the vague feeling of being back in composition class in school!)

The article is on obedience and why it's not necessarily a good thing in children. Ah well. To start with, I'm not a big fan of studies like these. Ten years down the line, it's very likely that someone else will find out that obedience makes your heart last longer or gives you a third kidney. But in any case, since I'm a parent and all and therefore qualified to be opinionated, I shall air my views.

Obedience works on hierarchy. Basically, somebody who is bigger/richer/older tells someone else who is smaller/poorer/younger what to do and expects the latter to follow those instructions because the former knows better (by virtue of being bigger/richer/older). It's a different thing when this is an employer-employee situation because the employee is paid to obey (even then, we must Facebook at work). 

As far as obedience in parenting is concerned, it is all about someone who is bigger and older telling someone who is smaller and younger what to do. As children, we're all taught to obey our elders and we're also duly made to read a hundred moral stories in which an annoying boy called Ramu with a neat haircut wins a medal for being obedient. But life is rarely as simple as a Ramu story. 

Funnily, the value of disobedience was taught to me by none other than my mother. When I was in Class I or so, we had this story called The Boy on the Burning Deck in our English reader. Now the actual story has a war background and all, but the story in our reader was simply about a boy on a ship who was standing on its deck because his father had asked him to do so. The ship bursts into flames for some vague reason and the father dies off. But this painful boy, instead of escaping when given a chance, chooses to stand on the deck and die because his father told him to stand there and not move. As five-year-olds, we were all expected to burst into tears at the death of this very noble child. My mother, after explaining the story to me, told me very clearly that in the event of a fire, she hoped I wouldn't be an idiot and stand somewhere just because she'd told me to. 

When we talk about how important it is for adults to cultivate obedience in their children, we assume that the adults in question are wise individuals who know and understand the world. Sadly, this is not always the case. Age, in my opinion, is rarely a qualification for wisdom. Everything around us ages, including the furniture, and one does not automatically become wise by defeating death one extra year. If this had been the case, we wouldn't have so many old people spending a good amount of time calculating the number of minutes by which their morning coffee was delayed because their modern daughter-in-law woke up only at 6 AM. Unless a person actively chooses to grow from life, the years do nothing to his/her intellect. Old people are just like young people. Some are wise, some are not. Some are painful, some are fun. 

Similarly, with parents, not all parents know what's best for their children just because they are parents. I'd like to distinguish between good behaviour and obedience here. Good behaviour is to do with social interactions. A child who insists on keeping his/her shoes on and jumping on somebody's white couch, in my opinion, deserves a whack (okay, a very light whack AFTER you've told the kid to geddofff a million times...don't call Childline yet). Good behaviour is necessary to cultivate in children because otherwise, we'll have a world full of unbearable adults whom we can't even whack. An intelligent child will figure out pretty quickly that good behaviour often works in its favour if the parents are supportive, appreciative, and exhibit good behaviour themselves. 

Obedience, on the other hand, works on the principle of threat and becomes a personality trait. It is a 'do-this-or-else' hierarchy and if the child falls in line all the time, it simply does not get the chance to think for itself. A well-behaved child needn't always obey what his/her parents say. Likewise, a poorly-behaved child could very well take up Engineering because mommy told him to.  As parents, we all have an idea about what we want our child to be. This is not wrong. But it's equally important to encourage the child to figure out what it wants to be. When you become a parent, your entire world shrinks to that of your child's. You are forever occupied in trying to do your best for it. For your child, however, the world is expanding and you are increasingly becoming irrelevant. This is inevitable and should be so. Even though I consider myself to be pretty broadminded, I'm quite sure GBM will someday shock and scare me by wanting to do and doing things that I wouldn't have done myself. It would be okay in her world and not okay in mine. And that should be okay.

When a child is old enough to have opinions (and even my two-month old has opinions on which part of the house she wants to tour), there will be instances when disagreements occur. But even if you disagree, do it with respect. Be willing to consider the possibility that your child might be right even if you don't understand how. Parents are often dismissive and forget the fact that children remember. If you are not willing to consider your child's opinion because s/he is a pipsqueak, remember that you are setting an example for the child who will not consider yours because you are an old fogy. And worse, you might bring up a child who does not value anybody's opinion.

I thought back to my own childhood when OT sent me this link and tried to imagine what my life would have been like if I'd been obedient and listened to everything that my parents, teachers and elders had told me. I concluded that I'd have been an unhappy Physics school teacher who had no clue about her subject. 

Moral: When there is a fire, get the hell out of there.

The Old GB Blog

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When I deleted my old blog, a reader managed to save many of my posts from cached pages and emailed it to me. Though I don't have all the posts, I do have many of them. I'll try and put the old posts up one by one on the following url:

The Old GB Blog

Now let me be unfunny here in peace :) Tatas.

The Kung Fu Panda

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This is in response to a comment made on this post in which a reader has fretted that this blog is turning into a mommy blog and s/he is not very pleased about it. Since a few others too have called this a mommy blog ever since I started writing about GBM (though some of them were happy about that), I thought I should say something about it.

Here's some news: I passed out of college a long time ago.

The Gounder Brownie blog (the first one) was started when my biggest problems in life were professors who didn't know how many lines made a sonnet. It's been close to eight years since then and yes, I've changed. I mean, what do you expect? I wasn't eighty when I started that blog for the posts to have the same theme of laughter club meetings for eight years. From 18 to 26, quite a few things have changed in life and it's only natural that it should affect what I write about and how I write it. I'm no longer as apoplectic as I used to be and I believe it's better for my health and my writing, too. Yup, I've even reached that stage in life when I care about my health. Who would have thought. I'll be appearing in Olay ads next.

And to those who are getting antsy about the amount of attention GBM is getting here, here's a gist of my life the past year:

3 months of nausea and migraines, 3 months of hyperventilating about suspected Hypertension, 3 months of severe heartburn and lack of sleep. One horrendous day of pain when I discovered what pain actually is. Six weeks of recovery from a major operation when I barely managed to sleep.

And right now, working my ass off in between feeding GBM and changing nappies to keep my sanity.

You see, I've put in so much effort into getting this kid out of me hale and hearty that I'd be damned if I'm going to pretend this subject doesn't interest me. Or act like I'm not insanely proud of it. This is easily my biggest accomplishment- physically, mentally, emotionally and though motherhood might be common enough, it's pretty uncommon to me. GBM also happens to look like me and there's nobody more fascinating to me as myself. So be sure that you are going to hear a lot about her over here. If that makes me parochial, so be it. So was Jane Austen. Heh.

That said, no, I'm not going to write only about GBM here. There will come a time, I hope, when I'm able to take a leisurely bath, watch movies, read books, meet annoying people, eat out, go on trips, attend job interviews, have colleagues, hang out with my friends, have long conversations, write blog posts without interruption, and so on. When all that happens, I might start writing about it. For now, I will stick to writing about what I'm experiencing. Like I always have.

We were all babies once. Not brinjals. I find it enlightening to watch the journey that I once made play out right before my eyes. It offers me a perspective that I greatly value. This is not to say that I've become a Zen Master. This is to say I've become a Kung Fu Panda. I'm blundering my way into wisdom. And this is the big screen where that story is playing out. Too bad if you don't like the show.

Me, Myself

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I've finally started going on my evening walks and it feels great to step out of the house for an hour a day. Of course, this splendid outing is limited to me walking up and down the road in front of my building and nowhere else because I should be able to get back within five minutes if GBM starts howling. I usually feed her before leaving and then she's content to talk to her yellow doll- Manja Coloru Manjula- or the box of her car seat. Or watch M dance. She doesn't seem to miss me during this one-hour period and I'm grateful to be of insignificance.

I've not been reading much. I tried to read Dr Spock very sincerely but I concluded that he just keeps saying you can do anything as long as you feel it's right. Which I knew anyway. Also, he keeps talking about childcare in 'simpler societies' and how it's all golden there and it began to annoy me. I'm pretty sure he'd consider Indian society to be 'simpler' and that certainly wouldn't be true, considering how complicated childcare here is. Every aunty worth her weight in Grand Sweets michur will have an opinion on what's best for your kid, even if the kid she raised turned out to be an A-class moron.

One book I really want to read is The Emperor of Maladies. I tried to read it when I was pregnant and quite liked it, but it was just too heavy to get past then. What with me being preoccupied with apple pie and all. I've come to realize that I basically don't want to read any literature where I don't immediately know what the hell is going on and who the hell the first person voice is. I remember wanting to read such books when I was in college and even feeling proud that I got them, but now that I have very little time on my hands, I don't feel like indulging the self-indulgence of others.

I try to watch one episode of Seinfeld every day on my laptop with earphones on when GBM takes her afternoon nap. Since she's started sleeping for seven hours at night these days, I don't try to put myself to sleep when I'm not particularly sleepy. I will eventually run out of Seinfeld DVDs though and I must plan on what series to watch next. I'm quite tempted to order off all the highly violent crime thingies that I didn't watch during my pregnancy. I'm sure some wise aunty will come and tell me that violence can be transmitted through breastmilk though.

I do some amount of writing every day, too. Whether it's blogging or work-related or even sending 'creative' text messages to N or A. It keeps me from completely transforming into a dairy cow.

This is the summary of my Me-time. And though it must sound pretty lame to all you swashbuckling young people, I'm pretty happy.

Kichidi Kid

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One of my greatest childhood regrets was that I was not Egyptian. I corrected this by calling myself Isis in secret. Osiris was my imaginary boyfriend. Yes, really. When we had to name GBM, we made a long list for girls and a very short one for boys (I just knew it in my bones that it wasn't a fella in there!). After she was born, we finally picked a name that wasn't there in either of the two lists. Both M and I agreed that the name suited her, had a good meaning, sounded nice phonetically blah blah. My secret reason for agreeing on the name, however, was that it ends with a 'ra'. I'm hoping GBM will have an Egyptian phase like I did and insist on everyone calling her Ra. Heh.

Which of course, makes me one of those dunderhead parents who actually believes their children will care about fulfilling their hopes. If my own track record is anything to go by, this is a highly foolish dream. My mum desperately wanted me to be all classical. Like learn Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music. I did learn Bharatanatyam. For two torturous weeks. After which, I gave up because the class timings clashed with Oliyum Olliyum on Doordarshan.Now, I'm playing all sorts of classical songs for GBM (phoney, phoney me). Last week, I also introduced her to the Beatles. So that, you know, when she becomes a depressed teenager, she can be depressed with class.

My mum also tried to get me to learn to read and write Malayalam. I was least interested in this project as well. Currently, however, I'm feverishly reciting Malayalam nursery rhymes to GBM. Similarly, M, who never admits to his Telugu identity and insists on calling himself a Tamilian, only speaks to GBM in Telugu. So much so that I find myself speaking to her in Telugu-mixed-Malayalam at times.

I wonder what GBM will eventually speak. M and I mostly speak to each other in English. I can understand Telugu (or at least, the Chennai-Telugu that M speaks) but cannot speak it. M can understand Malayalam and speak it like Vivek in Tamil movies. The only regional language we both can read, write, and speak is Tamil. We live in Maharashtra where most people speak Marathi as their first choice and Hindi only if we request them to (it's only recently that I discovered that Marathi and Hindi are actually very different languages- I always assumed they were more or less the same since I couldn't understand either). I really don't know how this child is going to speak though we will, of course, harass her in the first few years of her life by acting patriotic and insisting on her learning three Dravidian languages all at once. She'll probably end up speaking a bit of each and learn none of the languages properly.

Deep down, I think I don't care. I don't think I'd mind very much if she only learned English properly. There, I said it. Not because I think English is superior to the other languages but because it makes sense practically speaking. That's one language she's got to learn properly if she's to survive her education (and her grammar Nazi mother). Neither M nor I bothered to learn our respective mother tongues (just like several other parents), so why should we push it down GBM's throat? She'll obviously have to learn the local language if she's to get by (which I still haven't but manage to get by because I work out of my bed). But really, if she doesn't want to learn everything else, I don't think I'm going to push her and get all holy-cow. I know this is how languages die and we-must-take-pride-in-our-culture yada yada, but really, decimal numbers are bad enough to contend with as a kid. Why make life more difficult?

I'm going to try and find out if she's interested in learning dance/music/skating/tennis/swimming/salsa/maggi noodles and so on like a dutiful mother, but if she doesn't give a damn, I'm going to be happy. I mean, I was happy being a useless lump as a kid, so why not? I don't think I'll be heartbroken if she doesn't become Airtel Super Singer or receive commendation from Kala Master.

I hope GBM will read though :| I've already put together a picture book collection for her and all. I think I'll find it hard to accept if she's not much of a reader. Or turns into one of those bimbettey girls who is forever trying on lipstick (there's no lipstick at home though...she could try and look Goth with my kajal if she wants). I'd feel a little let down by these two factors considering I'm a children's writer who did General Studies and everything. But ah well, as a parent,the sooner I accept my inability to influence my child, the longer I'll keep my marbles.

I will, however, bring her up to believe that Egyptians are cool.

On Blahness

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I was at a New Year's party on the 31st. Yep, that's right, I'm still partying and all. It's a different thing altogether that the party was on the ground floor of the building I live in and I managed to go only after putting GBM to sleep. You wouldn't believe how excited I was about going for this party though. I was like a chipmunk on a sugar high and I kept admiring myself in the mirror because it felt so wonderful to be out of a nightie. Yay yay. Parrrrddddeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. M thought I'd gone mental, as usual. But really, it felt great to go somewhere other than the pediatrician's clinic.

GBM developed a cold last week and I spent a lot of time researching the Common Cold and acting like a huge calamity had happened. She was remarkably not bothered by it, but my heart still broke every time she sniffed.

I also spend at least ten minutes a day thinking about mosquitoes these days. I'm armed with an electric bat on most evenings and the quality of my tennis can rival that of the Wimbledon. I'm turning into one of those mega bore mothers who believe the bowel movements of her baby and such like deserve to be reported in national dailies. I'm pretty sure my mum is reading this and feeling highly smug.

I've managed to finish the first draft of the YA novel I was working on. Woohooooo. It's about 11,000 words long and I've never written with such speed and purpose before.

Which brings me to the title of this post. If I think about it, this is the most non-happening I've ever been in life. I haven't been to the theatre or eaten out or even gone for a walk in ages. My fashion sense is completely dependent on how soon the top can be unbuttoned. And not for reasons you might otherwise assume! I don't even get the time to have a long, uninterrupted, profoundly useless conversation with my friends. There are emails I haven't answered and this blog I've been neglecting. In all, my life would undoubtedly qualify to be blah.

And yet, I've never felt so super-charged about being alive. I've never felt so full of purpose. I've never felt so much at peace than now. Though a part of me wants GBM to grow up quickly so I can wine and dine away, there's a big part of me that's grateful to her for showing me how life begins. GBM opened her eyes to the sun last week. She usually keeps them tightly shut when we take her out because it's too bright, but last week, she opened them wide and just watched. It was incredible to see the wonder in them. And there's nothing blah about rediscovering what a wonderful world it is, after all.

Okay, I'm done being Chicken Soupy.