Childwise

KidCommandment#1


Last week, Ananya, my 10 year-old informed me that I just have to take her to watch the just released potboiler, ‘Ready’.

While I do admit Salman’s patented brand of puerility is sometimes good for a laugh or two, I was quite up to my gills in it after Dabangg. Let me put it this way, I was not ‘Ready’-ready just yet.

So I hemmed and hawed and said,“Umm… don’t know how the film is going to be. Let us take a look at the papers and see what Shubhra periamma has to say about it.”  (The periamma in question here being my sis-in-law Shubhra Gupta, a highly regarded film critic with the Express group.)

“Ya, let’s”, she said. So I did that, and duly reported back: “Periamma says the film is a dud... pretty silly and mindless, and not funny at all.”

“Shubhra periamma said it’s silly?” said Ananya, with a furrowed brow.

“Yes”, I said.

“And not funny?” The furrow deepened.

“Yup... not a bit”, said I, barely able to hide a triumphant smile - I might not have to endure ‘Ready’ after all!

The furrow cleared and she broke into a wide smile…“Oh great! Phir toh mujhe pakka achchi lagegi film! Book the tickets, na!”

The rationale, as you must have guessed, being: ‘If a knowledgeable adult pans the film, it must be a great film for juveniles of all shapes and sizes.’ Beat that for logic!

Amazing, how kids instinctively suspect/dislike/reject anything and everything that adults close to them choose to advocate! And the other way round, too.

And I remembered incidences from my childhood… I remember rejecting ice cream - yes you heard that right! (I know those of you who have seen me in recent times tucking into a 1-litre tub of Natural's jamun ice cream or Baskin Robbin's dark chocolate will find this rather hard to believe... :-/)

But seriously, I grew up totally hating ice cream – because the gaggle of 9 adults at home tried to make sure I only had 'healthy' ice creams (Kwality ke vanilla cups to be precise, which they called the ‘doodh-wala ice cream’). My heart, on the other hand, longed for those 20-paise wala orange and cola flavoured iced lollies, which the adults back at home claimed were made with ‘gutter ka pani’. But my tongue would literally hang out at the very sight of those lollies in all those interesting colours and flavours, while I felt like puking if I so much as even smelt a ‘doodh-wala’ ice cream.

Which brings us to…

KidCommandment#1: Anything that adults recommend strongly is uncool and eminently useless.

And the natural corollary to this: Anything that adults discourage strongly is worthy of exploration.

There are other pearls of wisdom that my brats have taught me over the years, which I will put forth in the coming days... those of you who have kids of your own, do share your gems too - along with your learnings, naturally - share your  own KidCommandments!

Grumbling. Ranting. Railing.

After that shamelessly soppy farewell to my laptop, here I am- writing the first post from a ‘new’ machine - ye olde desktop… my Common or Garden variety home PC.

And let me admit, when my laptop was taken away from me (rather forcibly, because in a last ditch effort I did pull out all stops to retain it - but to no avail), I did not foresee the ‘situation’ that was developing.

Let me begin my lamentations by describing my desktop first. It has an outsized monitor. I never thought adjusting to a monitor would take so much doing! Have you ever been stuck with front row seats at a cinema? Recall the experience. The disconcerting effect that the too-near and too-large screen has on you – you watch the film resignedly, but you just can’t shake off the feeling that the world is somehow totally out of proportion. That is exactly the effect that this monitor has on me.

Now imagine trying to adjust to this giant after years of gazing into the petite 12 inch screen of my old laptop.

Juxtapose this with an undersized keyboard. It is about 10 inches across, and feels more like a toy than the real thing. The feeling I get when I am trying to type anything meaningful on it is somewhat like trying to play raga bhairavi on a one-octave casio keyboard. L

And then there is the mouse – a supremely eccentric being, which rests more often than it works. Like a worker holding a grudge against the management, it just stops working, all of a sudden, right in the middle of a busy day. And when this happens, I have no alternative but to go out and beg, borrow or steal a mouse from somewhere before shutting all operations.

Want to hear more? The machine’s sound card does not work… so no music! And that for me, is a fatal blow.

Beginning to get an idea now? Anyway, this is not where my bemoanings end.

I obviously need a new laptop since I intend traveling a great deal in times to come. And it has to be a tablet because I want to keep up my attempts at sketching and cartooning. And what do I find? That tablet PCs have vanished from the Indian market. You either have to choose ipad type devices, or regular laptops – the beautiful thing that was a marriage between the two - my old machine, a lightweight tablet PC, seems to exist only in foreign shores and my daydreams right now.

So, you see, at the present moment, finding a laptop of my choice seems an even more unlikely event than my going and dancing at Ramdev’s dharna.

So, mera toh chakka jam - pahiya poori tarah se keechad mein phans gaya … ideas, suggestions and even bhashans welcome on how to pull the wheel out of the mud and get going again…