Month: October 2018

My Name Is Madhavi, We Are Just Like You

My name is Madhavi, I am from Allepey
I speak Malayalam But I am just like you

My name is Natwar, I am from Srinagar
I speak Kashmiri But I am just like you

My name is Shubrata, I am from Kolkatta
I speak Bengali But I am just like you

My name is Vasundhara, I am from Vadodara
I speak Gujarati But I am just like you

My name is Shamsher, I am from Ajmer
I speak Urdu But I am just like you

My name is Arundhati, I am from Guwahati
I speak Assamese But I am just like you

My name is Benjamin, I am from Panjim
I speak Konkani But I am just like you

My name is Ranimai, I am from Chennai
I speak Tamil But I am just like you

My name is Jaswinder, I am from Chandigarh
I speak Punjabi But I am just like you

My name is Madhuri, I am from Ratnagiri
I speak Marathi But I am just like you

My name is Jamshetji, I am from Panchgani
I speak Parsi But I am just like you

My name is Bindiya, I am from India
I speak Hindi And I am just like you.

Please do check out the Neem Peepal Banyan song. It introduces the trees to the children, similar to the way My name is Madhavi introduces the diverse Indian languages and regions.

Inspired by My Name is Madhavi from Karadi Tales, my wife wrote the below poem for O +ve and B +ve, our twin daughters. We use this to introduce different regions and languages of the country to the girls, missed out in the original song.

My name is Hemu, I am from Jammu
I speak Kashmiri But I am just like you

My name is Bela, I am from Rourkela
I speak Odiya But I am just like you

My name is Rupali, I am from Manali
I speak Pahari But I am just like you

My name is Rameswar, I am from Bastar
I speak Gondi But I am just like you

My name is Jaswinder, I am from Amritsar
I speak Punjabi But I am just like you

My name is Kishore, I am from Indore
I speak Hindi But I am just like you

My name is Bansi Lal, I am from Karnal
I speak Haryanvi But I am just like you

My name is Sachi, I am from Khunti
I speak Santhali But I am just like you

My name is Aniket, I am from Ranikhet
I speak Kumaoni But I am just like you

My name is Kalicharan, I am from Champaran
I speak Bhojpuri But I am just like you

My name is Devashree, I am from Kashi
I speak Sanskrit But I am just like you

My name is Baichung, I am from Lachung
I speak Bhutia But I am just like you

My name is Shivani, I am from Pilani
I speak Marwari But I am just like you

My name is Subrota, I am from Malda
I speak Bengali But I am just like you

My name is Vasundhara, I am from Vadodara
I speak Gujarati But I am just like you

My name is Bendang, I am from Tuensang
I speak English But I am just like you

My name is Mili, I am from Dilli
I speak Sindhi But I am just like you

My name is Somadeva, I am from Ambassa
I speak Tripuri But I am just like you

My name is Madhuri, I am from Ratnagiri
I speak Marathi But I am just like you

My name is Sharmila, I am from Lamka
I speak Meithei But I am just like you

My name is Benjamin, I am from Bambolim
I speak Konkani But I am just like you

My name is Butler, I am from Williamnagar
I speak Garo But I am just like you

My name is Jamshedji, I am from Panchgani
I speak Parsi But I am just like you

My name is Margaret, I am from Mamit
I speak Mizo But I am just like you

My name is Basavaraju, I am from Mangaluru
I speak Kannada But I am just like you

My name is Mamang, I am from Tawang
I speak Monpa But I am just like you

My name is Madhavi, I am from Alleppey
I speak Malayalam But I am just like you

My name is Mary, I am from Puducherry
I speak French But I am just like you

My name is Ranimai, I am from Madurai
I speak Tamil But I am just like you

My name is Sultan, I am from Kiltan
I speak Mahl But I am just like you

My name is Xavier, I am from Nicobar
I speak Nicobarese But I am just like you

My name is Melissa, I am from Silvassa
I speak Portuguese But I am just like you

My name is Chamanthi, I am from Tirupati
I speak Telugu But I am just like you

My name is Arundhati, I am from Nalbari
I speak Assamese But I am just like you

My name is Asaad, I am from Nizamabad
I speak Urdu But I am just like you

My name is Manan, I am from Daman
I speak Warli But I am just like you

We are Arka Iha, we are from India
We speak multi-languages
But we are just like you

Raising Children and Being Responsible Citizens

Our 4-years old twin daughters do not go to a formal environment – school / day-care / nursery. We have ample enough time to venture out as a part of their growing up. As the inquisitiveness and the curiosity of a child to know about her surroundings increases, wherever/whenever we go, the girls invariably keeps asking the below questions:

  • Why did the uncle spit on the road?
  • Why did the uncle not stop at the red light?
  • What is the uncle doing facing the wall?
  • Why is the uncle throwing the plastic bag on the road?
  • Why is the uncle driving at so high speed?
  • What is the smoke coming out of uncle’s mouth?

All of you also, I suppose, would have heard these questions and more from the innocent children. What has been your response?

I will tell you mine. Honestly, I do not have the courage to walk up to any of the men doing any of the above-mentioned activities and speak to them about what they did / they are doing. I just try to change the subject and try to divert my daughters’ attention elsewhere. The girls keep repeating these questions and till date, I have not been able to give any sort of sensible answers to them.

I had been thinking about these. I saw a connecting link to all these questions – It is always an UNCLE who is doing these activities that the children keep asking about. Why is it always an Uncle/Brother? It is never an Aunty/Sister who are seen doing such activities.

Why is it always a MAN, invariably a MAN?

I would be guilty of all such behaviours in my earlier avatar of being a non-parenting man. Now that, I am with my children, I want to set the best example for them. I would not indulge in any activity that I would find difficult to explain to my daughters.

In Indian society, women bear the primary responsibility of raising children. How much of un-civic activities in the society would get attributed to the women, as compared to the men? You, of course, know the answer. Why would that be?

We see that a man flouting the civic rules in public becomes a different person altogether, most of the times, when he is with his family. Just that, he does not seem to be spending much time with his family outside the 4 walls of his house.

Basis the above, I found a simplistic explanation of the man’s behaviour. The man who is busy doing the above-mentioned un-civic activities has not lent a helping hand to his wife/mother/sister in raising a child. I am not at all implying that to be a decent man, raising a child is a must. A man can turn out be a gentleman even without raising a child. Just that, a man doing un-civic activities is necessarily not contributing to raising a child in his family.

After all, no man would want to be seen doing wrongful activities in front of his own growing-up children. A man provides for his family, supposedly, hence no man would want to do activities that will lead to an unwanted conduct to his own self by his children.

The man gradually becomes more accommodative, more progressive, more tolerant, more persuasive – more of all the wanted qualities, once he starts staying at home for an extended period, on a continuous and not a one-off basis, with his children.

As a society, to improve ourselves, we have to encourage the active role of men in parenting. I am sure that this will have a cascading effect in us becoming a better civilization with men getting to understand what it goes into raising future citizens and making a better world for his children.

Thus, I present the case for being responsible citizens. The man has to learn how to be a man – raise a child.

How gender stereotypes get built in children by our daily statements

I have realized that there is a discussion going on about why the kitchen set gets gifted to the girls and the cricket set to the boys. Why Pink and Barbie are for the girls and Blue and Cars are for the boys? Why not the other way round or a different way altogether?

The objective of the discussion gets centred on keeping the child away from the gender stereotypes. A well-intentioned objective, I suppose. However, is the gender stereotypes limited to such obvious examples only?

I have heard the below statements quite a number of times in my own house-hold spoken by me / my wife:

I / Papa have / has come tired from office. Please do not bother me / him.

I / Papa have / has got a surprise gift for you. Say thank you to Papa.

I / Papa have / has a holiday today. Let me / him take some rest.

I / Papa am / is doing office work at home. Please do not disturb me / him.

I / Papa am / is taking an office call at home. Please do not disturb me / him.

I / Papa am / is working hard for your future. Remember this.

I / Papa will not eat your left-overs. Please give it to me.

I / Papa will play with you once you are fed and bathed.

I / Papa will decide what / where to shop and how much to spend.

I / Papa will not clean your poop. Please come over to me.

I suppose the above statements were regular fodder to the girls till the time I was working, one and a half-year back. Some of these statements were overtly said, some were understood by our twin daughters, even if not said explicitly. Once I left my job to become a full-time stay-at-home father to our twin daughters and my wife joined her organization www.facebook.com/Travelwithdirtyfeet, it was also an end to the above statements.

The girls, no longer, hear the above statements from their mother / me. I do not use any of the above statements for my wife even though I am fully aware that she slogs it out for the whole day running an experiential travel firm. I know that she used all the above statements for me even though I would have spent the whole day sitting on a chair, whiling away my time in meetings and breaks.

Even though my wife works and I do not any more, I cannot get myself to make above statements for her. Which, a mother is expected to keep making for her child’s father. To make matters worse, as a working mother (my wife), she cannot make any of the above statements herself, it does not occur to her. Rather, she keeps feeling guilty for leaving her children, which was an alien feeling to me, when I was working myself.

If I would have been still working, the girls would have continued hearing the above-mentioned statements. Their initiation in the Indian gender stereotypes between a man and a woman would have been over, by now.

What has got a kitchen set and cricket set / Blue and Pink / Barbie and Cars got to do with introducing gender stereotypes to the children?

I feel we do it all the time with each and every conversation, about our own perceived roles and responsibilities as parents. We need to get over our own gender stereotypes to start with, easier said than done.

What’s your say?

What should the parents of a 4-years old know – Part 2

This is the second part of “what should the parents of a 4-years old know”. For the first part, please click here.

Reward / Conditionality:

Being a stay-at-home parent has meant that I am never in a hurry. As the girls do not go to any formal environment, it has meant that they are also never in a hurry. In the case of any issue / any disagreement holding us up, we keep discussing it for whatever time possible, which is all the time. For that matter, even when we are outside the house.

We have consciously avoided getting the girls to act on a conditional basis. I promise that the focus will always be on the task and nothing else, though the task may not fructify at all, number of times.

Keep talking / explaining to the child:

As none of us is in hurry to do any task / go anywhere, we tend to discuss a lot. The girls keep on asking questions and I keep on giving answers to the best of my and Google’s capabilities. Though, this means that when we actually need to get ready / finish the task in a hurry, we are invariably late.

As a parent, I would want to encourage my child’s curiosity and if that means non-stop chattering and getting late for the task on hand, so be it. At least till the time, we can afford to.

Work on my own short-comings:

This is another tough one for me. I used to be a person with a short temper. I have realized that whenever I make the environment around not me not so pleasant, it has a direct impact on the girls. Of course, it is not a great discovery. For all the gyaan given to me, I had never heeded. Now, when I have seen the consequences on my daughters, I do not need any other further excuse not to change.

I realize that if there is anything that can bring about a positive change in one’s own self, it is being with a child.

Play, play & play:

What should the 4-year old be doing? Play, play & play.

Expectations:

It is a tough one. Well, let us be honest. After all the above inputs, what is the expected output? The child may not sing a nursery rhyme when you ask her to. S/he may not be at her best behaviour when you want her to. The child may want just a single pony when you want her to put two.

The resultant action of what we are trying to do with our children means that we have to keep our expectations from them in check.

I suppose around 3-5 years is the age of a child when s/he is actually a child. I have no memories of my being 3-5 years old. The daughters will also not have memories either when they are grown-up. How does it matter that they learn their alphabets/numbers 3-6 months, maybe even more, here and there?

We live only once, the childhood also comes only once. We long for those carefree days. It is not going to return for us though, and we have decided to give it to our daughters to the extent possible.

The last thing I want to know as a parent for my 4-year olds – Be a child.

PS: The things are of course not as good/rosy as I have written above. I am also trying to grow up with my daughters and trying to see how it works out for us, as a family. As mentioned in the beginning, we are a work-in-progress.