The Brave Pedestrian

August 7, 2009: My 13-year-old daughter had a nasty spat with a schoolmate today. Coming home in a bad mood with bite marks on her arm, she changed into her home clothes, and headed for her room, her computer, her personal space on the internet… her blog. Then my wife said something about the exams and told her not to waste her time, and got some kind of angry retort. Offended by the “attitude”, my wife switched off the computer, wiping out a few paragraphs of rant on the blog, and triggering an episode of tearful rage. I heard the shouting match and intervened. All the manuals on parenting advise that at such times, parents must pull together in disciplining the kid. But there’s one problem: I identify more with my daughter and her concerns about privacy and freedom, than I do with my wife and her concerns about propriety and discipline. And so my daughter and I had another one of those long, rambling father-daughter talks that we seem to have every six months or so. Much of w...

I write this tinged with sadness. I feel sorry for us… For the tragic comedy that is the essential human condition. In the midst of a carnival of plenty, Some of us are dying of thirst. In the midst of a deluge of love, Some of us feel left out and lonely. There is no dearth of emotional give-and-take in the crowd of relations that we stand amidst… Father, mother, brother, sister, son daughter, spouse, lover… And yet we suffer bouts of feeling heartsick and unloved. Yes, I feel sorry for all of us. Poor forked animal, whose overdeveloped mind afflicts him, Ambushes him with emotions that have little to do with the present. Poor forked animal, who carries a baggage of emotions from the past, And borrows some more from an imagined future. Poor forked animal, who cannot be simply happy With things as they are. We live our lives with the sour aftertaste of Yesterdays and yesteryears. We live with the bittersweet foretaste Of what the morrow will bring. We live in a world that has plenty,...