The Brave Pedestrian

March 8, 2007, Mumbai: Everyday, when my son goes to school, after a few quick games of stone-paper-scissor with me while we wait together at his school bus, I find myself saying, “Enjoy yourself! Have fun!” rather than “Take care.”  I grew up hearing my folks saying, “Take care” in several different ways. I don’t remember ever hearing them say, “Enjoy yourself” to me, or to each other, when we went out. Methinks these are signs of the changing times. Looking around on the iLand, and chatting with my iLand friends, I find that happily married people — both men and women — are now looking for intimate friends of the opposite sex, and seeking to somehow infuse fresh colours in their happy but monotonous lives. Through their poems and musings, I hear them saying,   “There must be more to life than being normal and settled, and bringing up the children. I want that now… and even at the risk of being thought of as a ‘bad-character’.” Increasing...

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...