My First Barbie Doll!

When I was a kid I did not play with Barbie dolls. Barbie dolls had not yet entered Indian markets. They arrived when my younger sister was just crossing over her phase of childhood, so she went without one too. So when we saw the Barbie doll ads on TV, we were swept off our feet. Hoping and wishing, we could have one too, just to keep it with us, if nothing else.

I did buy one when I went to the US after I got married. I even gifted one to my sister, but we did practically nothing with them. We just were happy we had one. I can be silly at times, to realise little dreams that I harbour. I don't care when they get realised, I just want them to come true one day and tick it off from my to-do-list-of-dreams-and-fantasies. So that was that.

When I was a to-be mom, I truly hoped it would be a girl. I dreamed of playing with Barbie dolls with my little girl! That would be fun I thought! And so be it! I got a girl. And so one may conclude, I was ready to buy Barbie too! Only to be hit by the reality of the real baby. The life of a baby begins with diapers and feeds, and the mundane pee pee and poo poo and burps and don't forget the constant sterilising of bottles, that is about it. Baby's life is simple, there is no need for Barbie, nor is the baby a Barbie. She is miniscule yes, but that is where the similarity ends. The moment she enters the home, parent's sleep and rest takes a rain-check from the back door, un-noticed and sine-die. “Barbie what Barbie?” I would have snapped, fervently and balefully, if someone mentioned such childish fantasies to me! Real life is not a Barbie commercial after all. Lesson learnt, it does not matter whether you have a son or daughter you have a handful to begin with. Same to same!

Even as she turned eight months, she would get scared of stuffed toys, she was not even ready for stuffed toys in the first year. That year was all about rattles, colourful bright and shiny and  teethers. She fancied, sounds and bright colours and small objects. Even the second year left me disappointed. That was the year of toys which develop motor skills, shape sorters, cookie jars, trains, ducks etc. Anything that could make some sound, either by shaking, pressing or dropping, took precedence over all others.

My own Barbie came out of the closet when she was one and a half. A nice girl-next-door Barbie in pink short dress. Its head dismembered on probably the third day that my daughter hurled it. I did not post one, but at hindsight I can say that, my Facebook status on that day could have been, Barbie-less again and good riddance! Lesson learnt, it does not matter whether you have a little prince or a princess, they both hurl and break objects at age one and half. Same to same!

When she completed her second year, I thought now I could get her some dolls. I took her to the most advertised and purportedly the largest toy shop of the city. And I took her to the dolls section, hoping that she would pick up a stuffed doll to begin with: the rag doll as we call it. Barbie cannot even be offered to kids till the age of three. I picked up a nice stuffed doll, the kind kids carry with them in movies and TV serials - quite proud of my choice! She dumped the doll straight on the floor and moved away from the dolls section altogether. A stuffed Daisy duck caught her fancy. She was fixated to it. We had a basket full of stuffed Disney characters at home, which I had picked up from various amusement parks in the US. NO, little one would not let go of that toy and so we added daisy duck to that already oozing basket at home. My dream for the Barbie stalled for another year.

And then it came like wild fire. "I want a Barbie," she implored one day. I did not believe it, I had given up on ever playing with a Barbie by now. Having faced three years of being a real mom, I had pretty much enough doll play by now with a real doll. I was not even looking forward to a Barbie anymore. And there it was, my daughter's first desire for a Barbie. I made sure she got one ASAP and then another and another till she had no place to keep the Barbie. No I did not get much play time with those dolls. Lesson learnt, it does not matter whether you have toy cars or dolls at home, you will be the one cleaning and tidying them up, not playing with them. Same to Same!

Finally my daughter has had Barbie's to her heart's content and I still feel a burst of pride to see those dolls sitting in my home and being played with. Here is another dream ticked off. I never got my first Barbie I'd say, but I have a doll that is no child's play to manage!

Pity Them To Shame, Those Eve teasers!

These days whenever I catch a man staring at me, I look back, smile and say hello. If he does not respond with a hello, he turns purple with shame, one of the two! I have come a long way.

I remember, I was hardly fourteen, I was just ten paces away from the gate of my house. Two boys in their teens, on an unwieldy bicycle came very close for my comfort, one of them brushed his hand on my cheek, gave a mirthful laugh and went on! I was a little shaken. I was later made to feel very bad about the incident, but at that moment, it did not record in my mind at all.

And just about three years ago, I was in this crowded hospital where men and women made circuitous queues, in a stuffy waiting room. As I crossed past a queue to get more information, one man touched me inappropriately. I did not think before grabbing his hand, I held it up like they do in the boxing competition, to announce the winner, “what are you doing?” I asked menacingly, as all eyes turned towards us, retaining the grip still strong and firm, I said, “Do not do it again.” The fifty or so people in that room were shocked and speechless. I left him there pale and purple, his poor wife embarrassed on his behalf too. I can assure you, none of those men in that room will ever take that liberty again! Not if some girl is going to make an ugly show of them.

So is it easy to be a man? It is really difficult actually. Man is the pillar of support to all and sundry, the breadwinner of the family, the silent sentry in the thick and thin, the infallible back bone of every home. There is a whole section of society, in all walks of life, where no one really bothers if men also have some unattended emotional need! A fear, a pain, a hurt, an inhibition, a weakness, a need for help, advice or support. Their emotions have been suppressed to the extent that, they just don't know how to express it anymore.

In fact it is quite common to see men closing up in their own space or getting really aggressive, one of the two, when they face with a difficult situation. In similar circumstances women would likely choose to talk it out. It is a vacuum which our male centric society creates for its favoured gender!

When a gruesome incident like that of Nirbhaya occurs, the whole society falls in a musing, don’t these men have mothers and sisters? Actually they don’t, not in the truest sense. Nor do they have any brother or father or a kin on whose shoulders they cry. Oh no, don’t mistake this statement as my pity towards them. These guys went too far for return, or redemption. But eve teasers are at every corner of the planet. They keep away from harm, but cause enough damage.

Most of these men have their support system in shambles, their mothers, sisters, and wives. These women in their homes share emotional support only among themselves. Men folk are to be held with high regard and respect only, not to be pitied and cared for and supported and advised. High and dry! Their Fathers and Brothers of-course are incapable of offering any such help. Sometimes these men fill no purpose for anyone, not even for themselves. Where else are the eve teasers being manufactured? At the backyard of these illusioned homes.

It is macho to get drunk in the moments of weakness, or to have insatiable desire for sex. These men are basically hapless and homeless, even-though they have a roof over their heads. Some of them, and a lot of them in the financially weaker sections, even fail to provide for their families, because they do not really consider their homes theirs. And we thought only women are suppressed, yes, as a result, they eventually are! 

What must a man do when he feels like breaking down? There are brave men of the world, who break down into tears before their mothers, their sisters and their wives, even fathers and brothers, even daughters and sons. These are homes with gender equity. And then there are those who break a girl's dignity, in an effort to hide their own weakness. Some do it as a vocation, day after day.

Faced with this quandary, what if our society redefined shame? A woman attacked by such a victim, yes these eve teasers are the real victims, should shame such a man into realising how weak he is. The entire society should shame the family which produces such an insecure man. Couldn't the family show more empathy towards their boys? On the other hand a woman who braves such sociopaths, should be given awards of honour. How do we bring this change? That is for each of us to figure!

This wedge from my memory comes to mind. After my dad passed away, we were three women left in our house, my mother, my sister and myself. We obviously managed our home by ourselves. One day I visited a friend who lived nearby. She had two quite short and much younger brothers, they seemed to need a lot of protecting at this phase of their lives. My friend a school hockey player was now studying in a reputed college far from home, managing life on her own. She was past her teens, and so was I, we went to school together.

I mentioned during my visit that, I was on my way to buy vegetables. This little boy, one of the brothers, of about twelve, to my utter amazement said, “Isn't there a man in your house to do all this stuff?”

When little boys are serving roles of sentinel to their highly emancipated sister, where is the chance for them to grow up hoping for emotional and physical protection for themselves? We create brats and we condemn them and then we get offended by them. Who is at fault?

Dear Readers, this morning I read another blog at mycity4kids, ‘Why I Kept Quiet When I Should Not Have’ by Gita Negi, it covers the same topic. Worth a read! I had been trying to write this piece about ‘Why women should be glad they are not men,’ So here is why.

Girls Can Do What Girls Can't Do

PV Sindhu, Sakshi Malik, Role Model for our Girls

"Mamma, boys in my class tease us saying, girls don't know anything!" Chill runs down my spine every time I hear this. My daughter is just seven. Where do these gender biases come from? Just to set the backdrop right, let me tell you, she goes to a school of repute in the city. Boy girl ratio in this school is one is to one. The school was founded by a woman, a widow, who was looking for a good school for her own children, in the sixties. No small feat! 

These stereotypes are difficult to dispel. They are in the structure of the society itself, one of those beams that holds up the roof. Our boys need examples that dispel their belief about girls, as much as our girls do, to know their worth.

We do what we can, we tell her to believe in herself. We tell her to analyse such blanket statements and see if there is any merit in it. There are just too many 'whys' for our comfort. It is her peer group that needs to rise up and accept that girls are no different from boys. How can we instil that belief in this generation of innocent minds, who are, quite evidently, already taking advantage this social lacuna?

So here is what Olympic medals did to our little home:

My daughter is scared of the dark, she is scared of ghosts and even some scary pictures in Geronimo Stilton! We never ridicule her for that. We humour her, but to be by her side, as she does her mundane daily activities every evening, is quite a strain on us. We want her to take her time to grow out of her fears. How long? I am not sure but it is bound to end.

Today, as we finished watching PV Sindhu's match against Carolina Marin, adrenaline drenched, frenzied environment lit up our drawing room, mirroring the excitement in the Olympic stadium. Just after the match, my daughter needed help with combating another tryst with the dark. 

"The lights are off in that room, come with me." Her entreaty.

"Did you see PV Sindhu, how brave she is?" I reminded her. 

Believe it or not, she did not think twice, she went straight into the dark, alone. Now that is, in no way short of a miracle! 

It does not end here, very quickly my daughter recalled the girl teasing that happens in her class. She was already connecting the dots! I had a ready response, "My dear, girls are no less than boys. Did you see the muscle of Sakshi Malik, did you see the resilience of PV Sindhu?" 

Salute to India's darlings, PV Sindhu, Sakshi Malik, Dipa Karmakar, Mary Kom, Kiran Shaw Majumdar, Punita Arora, Arundhati Bhattacharya and many many other trend setters. You are all role models for India's girls and Indian women. 

I remember reading a blog on Mycity4kids, which said, girls are not equal to boys, you can't compare apples to oranges. I resonate with that. No one has the right to take away the individuality of either, for any bias, any selfish gain and any ill-conceived notion. As women we mother both girls and boys, we cannot glorify one at the cost of the other. Striking that balance is what our society is yearning for. 

Parents do you never disagree in front of the kid?

'Parents should never disagree in front of the kids'. We are guilty parents. I wish we were not. We disagree, quite vehemently in front of our kid sometimes.

First Scene: I was really upset that day. I don't remember why. I just could not bear to see anything astray. And children are synonymous to astray. My little one first did not come to eat dinner in time, then did not clean her room, then refused to even do some bit of her homework and then did not agree to go to sleep in time. All regular and easily condoned acts for her. She is otherwise a very conscientious kid, but everyone needs to take leeway, what’s wrong with that! But my reaction was cataclysmic. I was really really upset. About what? I was upset that, she refused to complete some minor part of a homework, she did not abide by the time, she would not get enough sleep and therefore will not wake up for school next day. All my liberal parenting ideas shoved out of the window, I was the authoritarian parent that moment. No revolutionary thoughts of how does it all matter, she is just a kid etc. I was yelling at her. Expecting her to follow instructions because I was angry!I was a genuine pressure cooker blowing the whistle that moment. And who should rescue the little one from Mom's wrath? Papa of course. He came down hard and harsh at me. “This is not going to help. Leave her! You go to bed I will bring her when she is ready.” Am I glad he took over from me that moment? Of course I am.

Scene changes! Our little one is at the table. Hungry and restless this evening. She had already been quite cranky for long enough and we were at our wit’s end. In her fidgety mood, she drops a breakable piece of dinner set down on the floor. It falls with a crash and breaks into thousand indiscernible pieces. Papa, who had been bearing with her ill behaviour for some time now, blows his top. I notice he is about to take out the steam on her. I step in. “Have you forgotten the cracked I-Pad screen? You also break things by mistake…!” He cooled down after I had quoted some of his mistakes. We disagreed again and quite vehemently mind you!

We are a couple with lots of lapses, permit me to admit. But we have our daughter's best interest in mind. We could condone each other’s mistakes and appear united in these difficult moments. But let’s not underestimate the child’s judgment, won’t she notice the stupidity of it all. Won’t she begin to believe that adults can be excused stupid moments? And the other significant adults in her life will not even make an effort to protect her in these moments? Won't we truly crush our kid if we do not check each other in these moments of irrationality, when one of us loses it? I think our kid needs to learn to stand up to injustice, no matter who inflicts it. And then again, I may be wrong.

Tell me parents, don't you ever disagree in front of your kids?

Parenting 101 Misery

All parents know the misery of reading through the parenting 101 books! I am assuming for all of us, hope it is a safe assumption. Those books that say, 'What to Expect...', 'Successful Parenting', 'Positive Parenting' etc etc... Yet in-spite of the stress that they cause, we read them religiously. We follow them too, as far and as long as we can. 

We can very easily debate that, this is the era of ‘Super Parenting’... We are super conscious about how we raise our kids... 'We have it all articulated', not just the mother nor just the father, it is both. We are doing a great job of it. Just read the parenting blogs on this site it will substantiate this belief. We may differ in our views, but we have an explanation. We will not pass the buck on our parents, by saying, "I do it because my parents did it." That makes us a very sensitive generation of parents! That having been said, we continue to be people with faults!

What would be the one string that binds all parenting books? It is loud… I can hear everyone’s shout in a chorus- 'to-be-a-good-parent-be-a-good-person', a tad late for us to find out! I can imagine head turning, heart shifting and body tensing up, to these suggestions, every time any parent reads through pages and pages of the same line of thought! It is too humbling and too self-deprecating to watch our kids pick up our little idiosyncrasies. It is almost like being under the watch of the Orwellian 'Big Brother'. No matter where we hide our little diary of misdeeds, our little urchins find them and condemn us to a life time of torture, through the act of being an exact image of us. And then in some very critical moments they launch these missiles on us too. Ohhh... that is when we wonder why did we take on this daunting task of becoming a parent?

Those hushed up gossips are devastating... No matter whether we are the targets of it or we are the ones gossiping. It jabs at us. Did you see her son's behaviour? What will he learn if the Parents are like that? Her child steals, I wonder what she teaches to her kids! The child is so destructive... What are the parents doing all the time... fighting with each other! If parents don't set the right example this is what will happen! It goes on...

It almost always comes back to the parents. We are suffering the onslaught of it day in and day out. If we could, I know every one of us would become Mother Teresa, Vivekananda and Gandhi at least in the presence of our children... But wait a minute... Mother Teresa and Vivekananda did not have children, Gandhi? He failed miserably as a parent, becoming the father of the nation took its toll on him, to the extent that his eldest son could never fully deal with his own insecurities all lifelong. He died the same year as his father. So then, we have a shortage of ideal personalities, who were ideal parents too. 

At the risk of contradicting myself I must admit that, if we sharpen lenses a little more, we will find some unique personalities who also made a difference as parents. Marie Curie for instance, a two time Nobel laureate, her elder daughter was also a Nobel laureate. But I can guarantee that, when she was raising her children, there may have been lacunae in her parenting style too. She couldn't have been perfect, dividing her love between radium and her two children.

Becoming a grandparent is the ultimate victory in the journey of parenting. That is when a grandparent looks straight at her kid and mentally says, "Serves you right! I am lovin' it! Remember all those years...? Now you will know where the shoe bites! As for me, I will take the ring side seat and watch. And be in cohort with your kid too!!" They came full circle when we had our first kid and they looked up to their own parents (our grandparents) and said... "Here I am now, full circle and the baton is passed... let’s celebrate!" Because, the final parenting stroke comes not from our parents but from our own children... that is when we wake up and say... no more kidding!

The Parenting 101 books will tell you now. If all these years no one was able to put it in your hard head to not smoke? Now there is a reason for you to stop smoking! If no one could convince you to wake up in time! Now you have the reason, if you can catch any sleep that is. If none could convince you not to use the F*** and S*** words, now you have the reason. If no one could convince you not to sleep late, complain, leave food on plate... not to read while eating, to take bath every day, to not shout, not fight, not ignore when others are talking, eat the greens, don't fart... Now this little angel from heaven will teach you how to live. The representatives of our parents with louder and shriller vocal cord and also more severe consequences for you! They are the ultimate task masters in the life of every parent!

I know it is going to be a long arduous journey, I know it is going to be thankless for a long long time, I know, no matter how efficient you think you are, someone will always be telling you to get better... But have patience, at-least till your children have their own! LOL 

Ps. Chuck the 101 book aside, I know they are so thick and heavy, flinging them could cause muscle pull, just put them down gently, grab a pizza and some soda, slouch on the sofa, switch on the TV and relax while your kid is in school, once she is back she will be doing all that and you will be disciplining her!!! 

Dear Readers, This is just on a jocular vein. Does not reflect upon my own personal preferences or my parenting beliefs. I.e. I don't eat pizza! :)

The Years That I Lost... Careless Me!

This is how it happened... I know it because,
I am responsible for the loss and,
I take full ownership for that loss.

I lost these years just like that...
Six months to a project that hanged itself to the ceiling,
A year to a dream that only partially came true,
Two years to a job simply not made for me,
Five years I lost to a feud, that condemned me to naught,
I fought back, never gave up and I stand tall, you know that,
I even lost a year to a fad, never sure, was of any use at all!

9 years and a half don't you think that's a snatch?
I am 9 and half year younger than those,
Born the day I was born, born the year I was born,
Those who caught hold of time, never letting it go.

9 and half years is a decade, by approximation rule,
I have one decade more of experiences,
A decade more of fears, failures, vicissitudes and tears,
One decade that so many may have judiciously used,
To build more worth, more piety, more wisdom, more pride.

The decade that I lost, I went looking for it... trust me,
Like Columbus the explorer, I plunged into the high sea,
In the midst of devious, fierce, ferocious creatures of the ocean,
I was lost once again, I retraced my steps, I don't dare to return,
I am okay to lose ten years, It is fine, no complaints,
Ten years younger will not hurt me, I will deal with it somehow...

Dear Readers, I have written a poem after a long hiatus. We always regret the lost years, don’t we? What if those lost years made us younger? Wouldn’t it then become an attractive idea, to experience life in more creative ways?