Posts

Posted on

Of football matches and heartbreaks

Last week, one wet morning I found myself driving down a pathetically potholed road to the twin’s school to watch a foot ball match. All I know about football can pretty much be summed up as follows:
– World Cup matches happen at ungodly hours
– Players wear knee-length socks
– Said players are violent and often get hurt
– It is dangerous to referee a football match

The only players I know of are:

– Messi (not Messy, I just discovered)
– Ronaldo
– Maradona
– And Black Pearl, Pele (that one I learnt that from an Amol Palekar film)
However, with the son all over me to come watch ‘his’ match I had little choice. I wasn’t even sure he was on the team – he was a substitute. Does that count? I had no idea. For him it certainly did. It was a big enough deal for him to strut about for days bragging about how ‘cool’ his team was.
On D-day there I was – on the off chance that he would get to play AND manage to strike a goal AND win the game for his team! Yet I was there because since the twins came along I’ve learnt to believe in miracles.
It wasn’t too bad. The light drizzle was pleasant and I got to see first-hand how H managed to come home each day with mud-caked shoes and grubby clothes. The match turned out to be a draw with none of the sides scoring. The teams then took on penalty shootouts. Wonder of wonders H was called upon to play and to take a turn at the penalty kick (the last final deciding one at that) as the teams stood equally matched. He put all his might into that one kick. 

The ball sailed across, hit the goal post and bounced right away – far far from where it was supposed to go. Even as the claps sounded for the winning team I watched his face crumple. I watched him walk away dejected, shoulders down. I saw the tears he was trying hard to hold (This son of mine cries only too easily). I felt what he felt – that he’d let his team down. I wanted to run to him, to give him a hug. But I stayed put.

Finally the teams shook hands and it was all over and I could go to him. “We lost, mama,” he said in a small voice. I didn’t say ‘It’s okay,” because clearly it wasn’t. So I said the next thing I could think of, “You’ll do it next time.” And with that I had to be satisfied.
I was glad I went.
Posted on

Happy birthday to The Book Club

It’s
been some time since I posted news from The Book Club. This week it needs to be written about since we turned ONE! Isn’t that wonderful? I had forgotten about it till facebook memories sent me a reminder. I do love the idea of revisiting memories.

This last weekend the meeting was pretty special what with birthday celebrations as well as Friendship Day on Sunday.

After much sifting through stories on friendship from Harry Potter to Kabuliwala to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn I settled on a relatively obscure one about a young Irani girl who finds friendship in London even while retaining her uniqueness. With pre-teens staring us in the face that’s an important aspect of friendship – this idea of loving and retaining your difference even while being best friends. 

The Friendship drawing

The funnest part was the ‘friendship drawing activity’. (I modified the idea from a book of the ‘My Weird School’ series. Review coming up soon on my other blog, do watch out). Each of the kids were asked to think up something they’d like to draw – it could be anything. They came up with a flower, a bird, a train, a boat, a scene from the Irani girls life, a robot, a scenery etc. 

I then paired them up making sure the bete noires were put together. You should have heard the protests!! ‘Aunty I can go with ANYONE but her!’ (Oh they can be rude and blunt) ‘Aunty may we PLEASE exchange our partners’. But I stuck to the plan telling them none of them was so intolerable/intolerant that they couldn’t be with each other for 15-20 minutes. And then I asked them to  put together their two ideas and make up one drawing. It was amazing how quickly they settled down and got to work with absolute concentration. Even H and N who are always at loggerheads and who I’d paired together worked like a team.

We ended up with a bird-shaped boat, a robotic flower, a girl playing with a toy train while hiding under the bed during a bombing (That was from the story of the day) and bombs destroying a pretty scenery.
These kids are seriously brilliant.

If you work with kids anywhere this is an exercise I completely recommend. Not just does it teach children to work with people they don’t much like, it also prompts them to align their thoughts and ideas with completely divergent ones and work towards a common goal,towards a common win. Those are skills they’ll need to hone in life. 

I was pretty pleased with myself. The problem is I made it out to be a contest and now I have to pick the best drawing and I’m stumped.

Posted on

Bollywood and kids

I love Bollywood and there was a time I could watch
pretty much anything. I don’t remember ever walking out of a film and I’ve gone
for some pretty lousy ones. I sat through one of SRK’s absolute pits of a film
(I’m telling myself it’s age-related maturity which makes me
admit this even while the heart feels a twinge of guilt at stabbing SRK in the
back). Anyway, all I remember of the said film is that he exaggerated his worst
mannerisms and wore a jacket without a shirt ugh!!! But then he IS SRK and I
WAS young ……. and I am so digressing, but you do get the picture, right?
When the kids came along I discovered to my utter
surprise that I’d turned into a Bollywood prude. I found I had this unexplained
desire to keep them away from all things filmi for ever and ever. I
never did have a fascination for toddlers mouthing film dialogues or aping the
Dabangg dance.
I quailed at the thought of H and N watching crassly
choreographed item numbers to even more crass lyrics, painfully long drawn out
‘come-hither’ looks and counter looks, the even more painful camera shots
lingering on various parts of the female anatomy as much as the gore and
violence. Sometimes they’d come to me with a string of lyrics they’d picked up
from a friend and ask me what it meant and I’d explain the best I could. I got
by pretty well but then those were early days.
The first time N gave me grief for a film, it was Karan Johar’s Student of the Year. She was all of 6 and I was sure it
wasn’t for her while she was equally sure it just was, since ALL her friends
had seen it. To my dismay the society kids took to enacting out portions of it
and I found N staking claim to a certain role without ever having seen the
characters! She knew each of them
through her friends. Still, I consoled myself, it wasn’t the same as actually
seeing the film. Even today the non-animated films the twins have seen can be
counted on their fingers.
However, I have come to realise that trying
to keep them away from Bollywood while living in India is silly not to say
completely impossible. The trick is to filter them and that I hope I can
continue to do for a long time yet. What I remain firm on, is NOT getting
swayed by the ‘All my friends have seen it’ line. I
have friends and cousins who have taken the children along right from the time
when the kids were babies. And I have to admit the children do not seem any
worse (or better!) for it. I put this down to just another parenting quirk the children have to bear with.
I’m learning to let go little by
little. The twins have graduated from KungFu Panda to Chennai Express and we
have begun to watch some really good Bollywood films together but more of that in another post. I still do get the occasional twinge when H and N pick up some bizarre action move or
a weird piece of vocabulary from a film or when I watch N singing Manwa Lage with a look of immense
earnestness and I wonder how much of that emotion she can actually comprehend. I
AM over-thinking this I know. The sane part of me tells me kids hardly
internalise songs and dialogues like adults; but what to do – that’s just how I
feel.
And the prude in me cannot but
celebrate when given a choice the kids recently picked Minions instead of a
popular Bollywood flick. Maybe it was alright after all, alright to hold them
back just that much. Parenting is about individual instinct, right? And then about
hoping and praying fervently that it all turns out right.
What do you think? Is it okay to let
the kids be? Do we end up pushing them towards something by trying to block it
out?
Posted on

Of rude strangers at coffee shops

The other day as I was at a coffee shop with an ex colleague in walked this man. ‘Black coffee with milk on the side,” he tossed out loudly over his shoulder and settled down on one of the sofas with a friend.

A few minutes later we heard raised voices. The man was yelling at the staff – You have NO idea what a black coffee is and you work in a coffee shop!! You bloody f****** Indians . . . . . No don’t call them becharas (poor things). That’s exactly why they do nothing to improve themselves. We’re too soft with them . . . . . . . . DON’T, DON’T say sorry. Save it up for your bosses when they fire you.”

I had my back to the man and I turned to look just as every other customer in the coffee shop. The verbal barrage was vicious and brutal and very loud. It left us stunned and silent. Oh and in case you are wondering he was very much an Indian. I wanted to say something, anything. Something in support of the boy at the counter, anything to stop the man. But I couldn’t. All I could do was throw the rude man a furious look and turn back to my colleague. The man quietened down after a while.

My friend and I continued our conversation that ranged from books and my blog to his job with a newspaper. When my friend got up to go to the counter I heard a 
“What’s your name?” addressed to my back.

It was the rude man. He was alone; his friend had apparently left.
“Why would I tell you?” I asked half turning to him, still infuriated.
“Because I’m a writer too. I write scripts for soaps at Balaji Telefilms.”
I put a mental black strike against television soaps and their writers even as he seemed completely unaware of my reaction. He simply went on to enumerate the soaps he had written and how “people like me” would probably find them boring. For a moment I wondered if it was the same man at all. It really was like he was a different man, like the nasty scene hadn’t happened, or at least as if he wasn’t responsible for that vitriolic attack.
I was too outraged to get into a conversation with him. I nodded/shook my head dismissively as my friend returned to the table. Then finally when we were leaving he called out a ‘God Bless You’ from his corner!!
I am still stunned at this volte-face. Did he not realise how rude he had been? Did the boy at the counter not matter to him at all? Or did he think as a ‘creative person’ or a minor celebrity he had the right to ‘mood swings’? And worse, did he think I condoned his outburst?
Most definitely, yes!

What irked me even more was my reaction. I wish I had made my displeasure obvious. I could have asked him to keep his voice down while he was shouting. I could have completely ignored his attempts at a conversation I truly didn’t want to be a part of. Better still, I could have mentioned his earlier outburst.

However, none of this happened.
It was only later that I thought of scores of ways in which I could have expressed my distaste for his behaviour. For many many hours I couldn’t stop thinking of the boy at the coffee shop whose day had probably been ruined. 
Does this ever happen to you – this inability to verbalise your feelings – specially negative ones even though you know you should? How do you react to rude strangers? Would you consider reacting even if the rudeness isn’t directed at you? 

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Posted on

Enjoying the difference

The other day I had taken the kids to the dentist. As he cleaned N’s teeth tching tching at how she needed to learn to brush better, H noticing his beard and cap, asked in not too quiet a whisper (he is completely incapable of whispering), “Mama is he a Muslim?” I nodded a trifle embarrassed. Undeterred he went on, “Muslims wear caps na ma? That’s how I know. We read about it in class.” “Yes they do”, said I hoping the questioning would end right there.

Even as I struggled with the feeling of embarrassment I wondered why I was feeling so uncomfortable. From H’s point of view it was a perfectly innocent, though a tad personal, query. I asked myself whether I would have been equally embarrassed had he asked, “That aunty is wearing a bindi, does that mean she’s a Hindu?” I still do not know.

I was reminded of a similar incident while on a recent holiday at Lucknow. At a curio shop outside the Bara Imambara I found myself standing next to two burqua clad women. One of them picked up a small box and asked the vendor, ‘What is this?” and he replied off-handedly, “It’s of no use to you, it’s a sindoor-box’ (vermilion powder used by married Hindu women). The ladies smiled and put it back. I noticed the easy exchange wondering at how simply the religious difference had been mentioned, accepted and dismissed.

Perhaps that’s something special to Lucknow – that acceptance of the difference without attaching any judgement to it, where being a Hindu or a Muslim is just a way of life, where one can point out the difference without fear of being misunderstood.

While the uneducated/politically motivated lot insists on the ‘I/We are the best’ philosophy, the apparently educated/balanced lot go with the ‘We are equal/same’ philosophy.

Girls and boys are the same, all religions are the same, people from all regions are the same. That is so very confusing for a child. The thing is — they obviously are not. They are very different. It is the difference that gives them their identity – why take it away from them? Our lives would be richer and perhaps easier too if we accepted and enjoyed our differences.

Next time, I hope I won’t be thrown off balance when the kids put up a question like that. I hope I can allow them to question, understand and accept them with the ease and innocence that only children can.

**************

On a vaguely related note here’s a conversation we had yesterday morning during the school-time chaos:

H: Mama may I be a Muslim?
Me: You may be whatever you want but why do you want to be one?
H: They have so much fun. They get to go to the fair at the Idgah and get all kinds of goodies to eat and they even get Eedi.

They’ve recently read Premchand’s Idgah at school. I presume that’s what brought it on coupled with the fact that today is Eid and the excitement of his Muslim friends is very infectious.

I wish I had the time and the patience to explain that religion was much more than a few sweets and some pocket money. Unfortunately we were running late (as usual) and I had to let it go. Another time, another chat, perhaps.

Missing my hometown sorely today, I thought I’d cook up some sewain in honour of Eid. Mercifully a friend dropped by with a huge bowl of Sheer Khurma and saved the kids from at least one of my cooking misadventures. It turned out to be absolutely delicious.

Eid Mubarak everyone!

Doesn’t it look wonderful?
Privacy Policy Proudly powered by WordPress