Category: Growing up

A few hours back we were at a grocery store…. I said “no” to Iras’ question “can we get a cold drink?”…. then she asked “why not?”.. so I said “you have a bad throat”…. a little later she came back holding a bottle of pepsi says “look what I found, this is a warm cold drink”… what can I say…. I mean could’ve told her that the sugar also aggravates her throat irritation but then look at that earnest face… I mean do you really think I could’ve explained sugar to this determined young imp???!!!

At the checkout counter the shopkeeper says “card machine has gone bad, there is no network, so please pay cash”…. I checked my wallet and began rearranging the purchases to fall within the amount I was carrying… so Ria asks “why can’t we pick cash from the ATM”, I say “coz we’ll get notes of 2K and he wont have change then” so she says “lets go and try in the ATM I’m sure you’ll get 500 rupee notes”… we go to the ATM, well more like I get dragged trashing and bawling, and get mint fresh 500 rupee notes so Ria says “see, I am always right” so I’m like “yes yes all of you girls are always right”…..

later in the car Iras’ observation “I am always right about things like cold drinks and dida is always right about money”

to the little girl who tried so hard and made us so proud even before the race started…. the most enjoyable part of my day is when we run (you and I also dida and I on the way to school)

Winning is everything!
In a way this is what we teach our children all the time in some manner or the other. We just forget to teach them who they are racing against and what really is the objective? In doing so we do them a great disservice, we take away their self respect.

Winning is just one of the many things that adds up to a well rounded, successful person, and personally I feel it’s the smallest of all the things that add up. It’s a by product of being good at your craft.

Selecting your field of dominance is an important aspect. Find out what you are good at, what interests you and where do you want to be. Focus on learning about your field of choice. Does it make you happy? Who are you doing it for? Never do anything for the outside world, do it by all means for you and yourself alone because end of the day you are with your own self and outside inputs though fun and fancy will not help you feel accomplished and successful.

Building potential I feel is one of the things that is very important. A consistent effort to get better at things you do. Being truthful. Being truthful is a huge factor. If you cheat even in the preparation phase you’re just cheating yourself and not really focusing on the purpose. The purpose is to attain proper mastery of your craft not “just for the purpose of winning” but more for the purpose of becoming an authority on that topic.

Do not be discouraged by defeats at the races. Races are for horses. You have a different competition, that competition is you yourself. You need to be better than what you were yesterday not better than the others in the race. To be better than yourself you need to do things daily, change, fix, tweak, learn, observe, tweak, repeat. It’s a recursive cycle. Keep getting better and better, never stop. Certificates from the world mean nothing if you know you did not do your best. Do it right, do it better, again… tomorrow.

If you focus on building potential and not just on winning, if you focus on learning from what you practise, if you’re always running the race against yourself and never against others, if you appreciate the opportunity to enjoy your craft and find more and more ways daily to have fun while dong it all…… victory will always be yours because “you know”. Always like in practise be calm in victory as well. Because end of the day winning isn’t everything and those certifying your victory are not credible enough to know your potential. You alone can certify your victory, you alone can tell yourself, I did good, because you alone know what you are capable of because you alone have reached those limits and pushed them a little more every day of your life!

Last but not the least, do it for yourself. More often than not if you do it for the others you will end up injuring yourself, damaging your self, feeling unaccomplished and unworthy because your sense of accomplishment will always be tied to the approval of the person who you did it for. Yes your mom and dad and sister will be proud of you when you breast that tape but trust me we will be always proud of you even before the race starts because we know you did your best and you did it for yourself so don’t worry about people around you, they know, and if they don’t then they do not matter.

the bully issue keeps coming up ever so often when there’s kids around you…. this time it was Ira. Past few days she’s been complaining about a boy at school who pushes everyone around, spits at her friends, pulls her hair opening her plaits …well essentially he is a total boor. I recommended talking about it to her class teachers. During a PTM I also brought it up casually saying “I guess the boy wants to be friends with her and is not sure how to go about it so just see if you guys can get it resolved amicably”….

for a few days the complaints were still there but not so angry and frequent…. yesterday at dispersal time she came with her plaits undone. Recently she’s started getting plaits made as her hair is a bit longer now and she’s totally in love with them. So yes this was a big deal. She was quiet but I understood. So I asked “what happened?” says “Ansh pulled my hair and opened my plaits”. So I asked her “did you tell maam?” she is like “no use telling maam, if maam shouts at Ansh to stop doing something he just goes and shouts right back at them calling them idiot…. he was pulling Rhyka by her arm and spitting on her yesterday so I went and told maam so he was sent to another class but today he pulled my hair”….. So yeah I was a little disturbed and a little amused as well (after all what goes around comes around and heaven knows I was no paragon of virtue in my day)…. anyway I said “lets go talk to Shalini and Falak maam about it”. So off we went to meet the class teachers. The teachers were very receptive and apologetic about it, they explained that they had spoken to his parents about it as well and he had improved a bit but after the Ganpati break he was back to being a brat. They agreed between themselves that they need to talk to his parents again. So we came back reassured.

On the drive back home I thought I should maybe give her the “go codes” for handling bullies…. the way I had given the gyaan to Ria some time back. So I started talking about the escalation matrix…. first talk to him clearly tell him an emphatic “NO”. If he still persists warn him once more. If that too does not help go to the class teachers and complain to them. Finally if that too does not make any dent in his persistence beat him up!… I explained to her how it is perfectly ok to hit back in such a situation. I also advised her to form a gang of kids bullied by Ansh essentially include the others who have been similarly affected. She loved the idea and was all gung ho about going to school and beating up Ansh after forming her gang today.

Afternoon dispersal time, expecting to be summoned to the principals office (for having incited kids to violence) and prepared with my defence I landed up at school. Madam comes out all chirpy as usual. Says “I didn’t hit Ansh” so I’m like “right!! dodged a bullet there”…. further explains “see if I hit him then he will hit me again, and then I will hit him again and it will go on”….. so much for Khan ka gyaan!! I asked her “did mamma explain that to you?” to which she says “no I thought about it in the morning and figured it out, I’ll just ignore him.”

This is a 4 year old who can’t get into her dungarees without asking me to help her…. daymn I should’ve met her at least 36 years back when I was 4…. would’ve exchanged valuable life lessons…. maybe made some friends….

getting out to pick up Ria it was raining heavily. I had forgotten my umbrella at the Ford service centre last Saturday. So hesitantly I asked Ira, do you want to come or will you stay at home with auntia (Kulsum, she takes care of the girls and the house during the day time) while I go and pick her up…. almost instantly the reply came “no, I’m coming”…. downstairs I asked her to wait in the portico while I went and fetched the car. It was raining pretty heavy and I was decently drenched in the walk to the car. As we pulled out of the gates I started imagining that we were going to park right in front of school as that parking was going to be empty….. my visualisation trick to line up parking slots….

As we reached the spot it was taken and so were all the spots near it…. so we just went and parked a little further down the road and waited… at 2:45 we got out of the car and walked to the gate to pick up Ria. It was still raining but not as heavily. As we reached the gate we saw the slot right in front of the gate, the one I had been visualising all along, was empty and so was the one two cars behind. I checked and realised Ria’s class was not yet being let off. So Ira and I looked at each other and ran to our car some 400 metres away. Drove up and parked right in front of the gate….. no this has never happened earlier and no it is not something that can happen so easily in such heavy traffic…. thoughts do become things…. just believe in them long enough!

A friend today asked about the meaning of the names of the two kids. I began by giving her an explanation which went something like this:

we wanted a short and sweet name for the elder one…. also since my last name was anyway going to be slapped to the back it was entirely Sonalis choice…. Ria is the name of a Greek Goddess the mother of Zeus…. but that wasn’t on her mind when she picked that name…. I found out about it later on and it was a nice coincidence as we are a lot into those Greek mythology related games …. so yeah anyway that’s the origin of Rias’ name… as for Ira we asked Ria to suggest a name and she came up with “Ria”… I said ok lets keep the letters and make it Ira and that kind of went down well with everyone…. so yeah very simple story behind the names…. Ria it seems in Greek means River…. and Ira means “watchful” in Hebrew

….then I went and googled her name and landed up on this wiki page Turns out we named her something meaningful….

Ira is actually extremely watchful she never misses anything that’s going on around her…. even from a very small age she is very careful and protects herself much better in a fall than Ria used to at that age…. now a little older she is extremely observant and protective of her big sister even getting into fights with other kids for Rias sake…. . That’s the part that is related to the “watchful” and “warrior” interpretation of her name.

Neighbors are surprised about her ability to communicate so well and speak so clearly at less than 2 years of age.

Ria on the other hand means River in Greek and our elder one is exactly that…. always giving every calm…. it’s a humongous blessing to have such a person around us… she is always willing to give away even her last toy if it someone asks for it and talking to her is therapuetic the way she resolves conflict and cools you down…. so yeah name meanings do make sense… and unknowingly (to a large extent) we got ourselves two amazing names for our perfect daughters 🙂

Sonali has started going to office from today. She had taken a 5 year break to focus on bringing up these two mutts. We had had a long discussion and taken that call in 2009. We again had that longish discussion start of 2014 and decided that beyond 5 years she would be practically unemployable and that would be the end of a superb career, something that would be really disgusting and wasteful. She is doing great as a partner in my freelancing jig but it’s not the best utilization of her core competence… besides I did not want history to repeat itself…. my own mother, a mechanical engineer and a career woman who actually had a better chance at being successful than my uber successful father, gave up her career when I came along. To date I hear the “I gave up my career so that you could succeed” jibe being thrown at the poor guy….. oh no no no no no no not going to give SG that ammunition in circa 2040…. besides it’s time we realized our full potential and discovered the diamond in us (Arindam Chaudhury aap sunn rahe ho)….. so anyway Sonali pinged Shriraj at Paladion Networks…. they said that they would always welcome her back if she chose to come back.. she met the core team at Paladion to discuss it further and was offered the job title “Head Products”… basically the ideator who would chart the route that the products division takes over time… pretty much the same level that she would’ve been at had she not taken the 5 year break (Paladion is a very simple, sorted out and spectacularly grounded success story…. the sort of company I would like to build some day once this transition phase has been suitably handled and the kids are ready for another change)….. So yeah SG has done her bit bringing up these two kids who are some of the most intelligent, strong, sharp, beautiful, considerate….. I could go on after all there’s a bit of me in there as well…. that I’ve ever known/read about…. and now they are at a stage where they are practically self sustaining…. well almost…. we do have some bit part to play in the sustaining bit for a few more days I guess…

So to prepare for the transition we had started doing a few things that would kind of condition the kids for mammas absence during the day time…. we started waking up at around 6:15 instead of lazing in around in bed till 9AM like a bunch of alligators… once up we would quickly clean up and go out for a walk. It gave us time to discuss and plan the day/days ahead (stuff like garbage bags, and milk cartons are going to be over we need to make a grocery trip OR we need to put in a request for reinvestment of this particular SIP as its not performing well consistently over the past two years etc. etc.)…. the bigger goal though was to set up a time when the girls were mildly exhausted, from the walk, and had also had some “hang” time with mamma…. it’s slowly turning into a habit I hope to move the time even further back to around 6:30 getting out of the house type early …lets see…. besides it gives me time at the start of the day to fit in a quick run which is great as I’ve been struggling to get the routine going for forever now….

The other thing she did was talk extensively to Kulsum, our maid from heaven (she’s been with us for 10 years now, touch-wood to that)….. they discussed what all will need to be done, how to manage the baby sitter who is relatively new…. meal plans (there’s actually a menu of the day that has been shared with me on google docs…. talk about wired lives)…. so anyway that was important as the kids are very comfortable with Kulsum and will take a bit of time to acclimatize to the new sitter (previously there were two other sitters who are sorely missed… the first one lasted 4 years and then got married and went away, the second one who overlapped for a bit lasted 2 years and then had a baby so went away…. after that a lot of riff raff passed through…. hoping this new kid is better and lasts for at least 4 years….)…. so anyway that was handled….

There was a bit of shopping involved for office worthy clothes, FabIndia made a neat little fortune off of us but that’s ok they deserve it…. (side note: if anyone is looking to gift me something in the near future, please consider the linen pants at FabIndia…. fawn or olive green or white or any combination there of will do… my waist size is 35″ at the moment and those pants cost around 1600 bucks…. the ones with a draw string…. ok end of advertising my own agenda ….moving on). We also experimented with a dry run when mamma went off to Rajyams place for half the day and then made a trip to Hypercity for the second half… mammas car got a once over, tank up, new car freshner the works as she would be driving to work most days….

So basically we just went about preparing for this transition over the past couple of weeks. The trip to Jaipur was cut short, my school reunion is being skipped (first one in 22 years) and we did a lot of talking to the kids as well…. the most important thing of course was the talking the kids as contrary to popular belief children understand and they adapt better than adults.

Anyway to today morning we woke up and went out for the walk/swings. Ria was not really as excited as usual and wanted to skip the walk and go straight to the swings. I took her along with me while mamma handled Ira…. I gave her the legendary “Khan ka gyaan”…. told her “look kiddo when you feel uncomfortable about something that cannot be avoided the best way to handle it is to do it first and do it quickly so that it’s out of the way”…. gave her examples of how a bandaid should never be taken off slowly :)) or how if it starts hurting while you’re walking back home you should start walking faster (the pain wont go away but you’ll be home sooner)….. so anyway she completed the 2K walk and then SG took the girls to the swings while I finished my remaining 3K run….. back home Ira wanted to get bananas so SG and Ria went upstairs to make oats, get showered and get ready for the day….. Ira and I walked to the fruit store, got us bananas and walked back to our building found a bench and finished the banana…. she spotted a cat… the distraction helped finish the fruit faster…. back at home the girls were ready…. I took Ira to give her a shower and told Ria to get Iras’ clothes… said buhbye to mamma as she was supposed to slink out while we were in the shower…. which she did.

By the time we were done drying off, powdering, putting on clothes Kulsum aunty rang the bell…. she took over the kids from me and boy were they happy…. turns out Kulsum had reported to work a full 1.5 hours early and is going ot do that for the next few weeks till schools reopen and the kids do not need to be taken over that early. So yeah there was breakfast and some art work and some playing which happened while I put in an hour of work….. then the sitter came in around 10:15…. kids were a little cranky as Kulsum moved to the kitchen to cook for the day and so I went and sat in the living room to give them someone to come and bash up for whatever was going through their heads…. Ira knew that mamma has gone to “ophish” and will be back in the evening. The sitter is a 16 year old kid and kind of clueless on how to get buy in of the kids…. so I gave her a bit of talking to explaining how kids can sense your inner joy when you interact with them and how these kids were the only reason she has been hired no other services are required of her…. she shook her head like all irreverent 16 year olds will do when being talked to condescendingly…. there has been a considerable amount of improvement though as the kids have been in their room and everyone including the sitter is in one piece so far…. lunch was ready at 11:30 so we had it at 11:30…. Preeti didi (the sitter) was unable to convince Ira to eat so I took a call and asked Kulsum aunty to feed the little one and Preeti to clean up in the kitchen in exchange…. that worked out pretty well…. after lunch the kids went back to their room playing with some blocks and chatting up Preeti didi…. I was actually able to get a 15 minute nap…. around 1PM when Kulsum and Preeti needed to have their lunch I read stories for the kids…. no crankiness all good…. smooth so far… Ria completed her writing as well (30 to 70 number names skip 2 and a page of story writing). They were hungry again at around 4PM so I asked Preeti to give them the bread pakodas that Kulsum had prepared for the evening snack….. the little one had half Ria had a couple of them…. good again…. I made nimbu paani which again was well received…. so yeah smooth so far… They’re having a bath right now, Preeti is monitoring them (there was a small incident with camphor which made me order an out of turn bath and mouth rinse…. nothing huge).

So yeah day one going good so far. Looks like we’re going to be ok. Tomorrow the plan is to let them simmer a little more…. we’ll start fitting in a few activities from Wednesday onwards… activities that we usually do with mamma just so the girls get used to the idea a little more…. lets see the real stories would fly once mamma comes back from office around 6:45PM….

Yesterday we sold off Iras’ cot. I had put it up on OLX earlier in the day after we figured it was just occupying space and not being used anymore. Moreover our mutt had discovered a way to jump out of it and had so far managed to land on our bed but then accidents can happen…. so yeah it had to go. There was no scope for any of our friends/family wanting/needing it either….. the buyer was a couple from Vashi (5minute drive from home). They came over around 2245 and had a look at the cot. We assembled/disassembled the cot then assembled it again as the guy wasn’t sure he would be able to put it together on his own at home. He asked me to knock off a 500 bucks from the price which I agreed to. We added the bumper, bed sheet and quilt as freebies…. A friend of theirs came with his pickup to help cart it away. We took a picture for Ira for when she grows up and asks “kidhar gaya mera cot?”.

The baby who will be using the cot is 6 months old now. We were extremely happy to have made the sale to these people for two reasons…. the baby girl is extremely friendly and was not at all cranky about being picked up and carried around (usually kids stick to their parents)….. an absolute bundle of joy in the true sense….. the other reason, as we later found out, the girl is an adopted child and has come to these new parents on the 10 of this month….. somehow when I found that out I thought oh chuck it I don’t want your money guys take the cot and everything else as well….. the thought of such a sweet baby being in an orphanage for the first 6 months of her life was very disturbing….. the new mom told us that there are 40 odd kids at this orphanage and they do not have enough manpower to take them out for walks etc. and so the baby had hardly seen the world in the past 6 months…. now when these guys brought her home on the first evening she was taken out for a walk in the park. The kid was very excited upon seeing the world for the first time and from then on every evening 5:30 she starts perking up for the trip out and literally pushes everyone to take her out.

The incident left me wondering ….there’s a bunch of people out there spending a fortune on fertility clinics trying to make a baby while such amazing babies are waiting for someone to pick them up at orphanages around the country….. what could be more heartbreaking and depressing.