The Doorbell

When you have young children you realize that each day they grow, they evolve and do something new, something that you might not be aware of that they could do (or sometimes, should do). With a young child you are seeing the most sophisticated learning machine in action.

And this learning machine has but one purpose - how to age you (the parent) in the shortest possible span of time.

By age I do not mean 'Age, verb, to bring to maturity or a state fit for use: to age wine.' I mean the humble 'Age, verb, to make old; cause to grow or seem old: Fear aged him overnight.'

No one tells you it is so. Not your parents, not relatives, not friends or colleagues. Possibly, they don't realize that this is the case (I doubt this), or they don't want to share their discovery with you. Maybe you were a difficult child and grandparents can now revel in payback time.

There is a rule to children that I have discovered and now I intend to share my wisdom with all comers:

No matter what folks might tell you, the time a child has spent on the planet is inversely proportional to said child's manageability.

Simply put, from the day junior is born, it starts going downhill for you. A school of thought puts the acme of manageability of a child at conception, but I have not been able to research it adequately.

You might feel you manage a child better, the older a child gets. In reality you just get more used to it or, eventually, resigned to it.

People will speak to the contrary, scaring you with stories of night feeds and colic and crying and child-proofing and other unforeseen hazards that no one can tell you about exactly, solely due to the fact that they are unforeseen. But, I stand by what I said earlier. Downhill. Day one, onwards.


I will use this piece to debunk a lot of myths that float around regarding children. A lot of people don't do things that they normally would, because they have children. 


Take the case of our friends, who recently became parents for the first time and immediately set about not planning to do stuff. It made for interesting watching - they would 'not-plan' holidays, 'not-plan' trips downtown, 'not-plan' picnics and such activities. In fact, 'not-plan' became the single biggest thing they did. It became a central activity that took so much time that it barely left them with any time to actually do anything. All of this stemmed from the fact that their first and eldest was very young, just a few weeks old.

Someone had given this new-parent-couple a whole lot of conventional wisdom on kids. It must have been true at some point of time, before vaccines and other advances in modern medicine, the invention  of the water closet and of course air travel. The excuse 'She is just two months old, we should really not be travelling' no longer holds water, unless of course by traveling you mean letting her drive the car, since not only would her reflexes not be up to it, but she might also be unable to reach the brake while holding on to the steering wheel.

Now think about it this way. What does a newborn need? Well, I've had two and I can tell you: a newborn needs to be fed when hungry, burped, changed occasionally and be allowed to sleep constantly. If the baby is breastfed, all the better. You can do away with bottles and cleaners and brushes and sterilizers, you just need the mother.

Think of a packing list for a vacation with a newborn:

Mother - check
Diapers - check
DONE.

On the other hand, a packing list with a toddler would read something like:

formula - check
books - check
toys - check
diapers - check
bottled food - check
sterilizer - check
And the list goes on. After age two, even airlines give them a full baggage allowance. And when they grow even older, parents become what one might call an "optional extra" for a vacation as far as they are concerned.

For newborns, just looking at a parent is entertainment. For older toddlers, you need to juggle five balls while standing on your head just to make them stop and listen.

The second big thing after basic needs is mobility. Newborns stay where you leave them. You can leave your precious bundle of joy sleeping on the bed and go and do something till its time for her to be fed.

A few months on and they start to turn. Now you can no longer leave your precious bundle of joy sleeping on the bed. You have to build fortifications of cushions and pillows and quilts.

A few more months on and crawling begins and after this it gets worse alarmingly. Kids can crawl, but either have no perception of depth or believe they can fly. Their sole aim in these months becomes to take a tumble from the bed. Most succeed.

Then comes proper walking. They run into stuff. My son, for example likes to run via sonar. He runs while looking back. He has thus tackled walls, tables, bicycles, neighbours, you name it, he's run into it.

And that is not all. He has become increasingly innovative in the situations he gets himself into. Life is no longer boring.

When my son was a few weeks old, I could leave him in the middle of the bed and go away. An hour later, he's be in exactly the same spot. Cut to three years later. My son calls out, "Papa, I need help!" I go to the living room where the sound seemed to be coming from, but I don't see him anywhere.

"Papa H-E-E-ELP!" The sound seemed to be coming from some way above the ground. I trace him.

The young man had climbed up on the sofa, stepped on to the arm, made his way up the back, using it as a stepping stone, climbed on to the grill of the window that is a metre and a half from the ground and had gone all the way to the top. He did not know how to climb down. That was why he needed help.

Today he is climbing window grills, tomorrow he will wreck my car.

There is another downside to increased reach and mobility. When he hit 100cm, my son realized that light switches were within his reach. So he would switch on every switch he could find. He couldn't switch them off as he couldn't reach the top, but he didn't care. Once, we had gone to visit someone at their apartment. We said our goodbyes and my son and I were standing in the passage outside someone else's apartment.

He rang the bell.

An old lady opened the door, looking none too happy about the intrusion. The way she looked at me was part quizzical, part challenge, she was geared to refuse whatever it was that I was about to ask. I was almost pressurized to try and sell her insurance or my car or to do a market research survey.

"I am sorry," I stammered. "My son rang the bell."

She looked at me. She looked at my son and then back at me, with growing disbelief. She seemed to shelter behind the door partially, the action seemed to indicate she thought I was a potential lunatic, albeit with a child. My son meanwhile had sprouted wings and a halo and had lost a few inches in height.

"He did ring your bell!" I exclaimed, hoping volume would add weight to the truth I spoke.

"Why...?" She croaked.

"Because he has hit 102cm and now he can reach it and then he does these things, he is exploring you see..." I rambled on.

"...WHY didn't you stop him?" She hissed and slammed the door in my face.

And that was that.

He will wreck my car. I am sure.

Announcements

I recently came back from a trip to India. It had been a year since I was last in the country and it has been quite a few years since I last lived in India. 

India is a massive place – languages change frequently, as do religions, customs and cuisines. This massive country is also undergoing change at an extremely fast pace. Each year I go back to India and see the landscape is different. Roads change, earlier they used to be re-named, but now they are actually new – flyovers, bridges, flights, airports. The march is on. I spent a majority of my life (enough of a majority to permanently change the constitution I hope) in India, but all the change still leaves me confused sometimes when I go back. So for short-term visitors, India can be quite baffling.

I remember a friend from the west asking me on his third day in the country whether road rage was a problem. I didn't quite get what he was saying, as in India, depending upon where you are, people could always be angry or never lose their temper. He explained he meant the honking.

Honking in India is not a symbol of road rage or an insult or a warning. It is simply a method of communication. Indians are, on the whole, a sociable people. We like to speak, share, eat, live – in fact we like to do everything that we do, together with other people. And to share everything, one needs to communicate and when one is trapped in cage of metal, hurtling along a road to a destination far and the urge to communicate comes upon one, what does one do?

Honk.

Honking is not an expression of anger. It is an announcement – of existence, of intent, of happiness, of kinship, and only sometimes, of a pique.

Culturally, we Indians are pretty big on announcements. We announce everything and everywhere.

When Hindus go to a temple, we strike a bell, so it tolls, announcing to God "I am here, listen to me. Now it is my turn." We understand that in order for God to give, He needs to know and to know He needs to be told, and how do you do any telling without making sure you have His attention first?

Hence all the bells in temples.

Even roads have announcements in India – subtle ones that you can possibly miss, if you don't pay attention.

Zebra crossings on the roads. They announce the presence of a place where pedestrians may cross the road, but there are no special privileges accorded to them at that particular point. There is no button to press that might stop traffic, there is no warden who might help in holding up traffic while people cross the road, vehicles don't stop - in fact at most zebra crossings they can't stop since the crossings are made very conveniently at major junctions or just s few yards before them. All this points to one thing. A zebra crossing is an announcement that says people are, in principle, allowed to cross roads.

Another way of making announcements that is quite common is one of engaging the whole environment around you, for example, restaurant in a unique one-sided conversation when a person decides to answer his or her mobile phone. The whole scene plays out beautifully. It begins with the phone announcing its presence, loudly. The rest of the folks rummaging through various receptacles in their respective clothing till a person announces “It Is Mine.”

And then of course, you are hooked, being forced to listen to details that otherwise you wold never be privy to. With any luck you might get to know what the Prime Minister had for breakfast.

Honking while driving is a more casual kind of announcement - it is more a statement of my presence that an obvious indication of some misdemeanour on a fellow driver's part.

It might also be a result of the fact that road sense or courtesy, if one may, has been distilled to just two simple rules:

1. The bigger vehicle has right of way.
2. When an accident occurs, the blame is apportioned proportionately to the size of the vehicle

As you can see, the first of these rules is exceedingly simple and is naturally imprinted on all living things. The second flows from the first: 'With great power comes great responsibility,' as a superhero was once told.

Of course, you can also see that this puts pedestrians, to use a biological analogy, at the bottom of the food chain. And another reason to make everyone aware of one's presence (pedestrians wave).

Just like some people speak less and some people speak more, some drivers are bleaters - they are insecure and would like all and sundry to know that they are there. Once, many years ago, a friend was driving me home at about two in the morning. We were crossing a stretch of road that was absolutely deserted and he honked.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because it was too quiet he said.”

That's the thing about announcements – the choice of “to listen or not to listen" is taken out of your hands. The announcer and the announcee hold an inviolable trust – you too, when the occasion demands should never shirk from announcing whatever it is that you can. It is your social responsibility.

Shopping Boomerang

My wife likes to shop.

The key word here is 'shop'. It is a usual, nondescript four-letter-word of the English language. But when my wife gets hold of it, she fills enough activity into this innocuous word to put to shame a colony of terns during mating season.

As far as I know, the objective of the process of shopping is to end up with possession of something either tangible, like a 'good', a piece of clothing, maybe a gadget, shoes or an intangible, a 'service' - say a massage or a haircut.

For my wife, the actual purchase (e.g. Obtaining legal ownership of a 'good') is just a very small part of the larger whole. Just like genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, for her shopping is 99% experience and 1% money changing hands. If one were to skip the process entirely and vault straight to the purchase itself, there is an acute feeling of un-fulfillment.

My wife is a very active shopper. I don't mean to say she shops actively, but that she is very active during shopping. There is a lot of brisk walking, climbing stairs, zipping through aisles, avoiding carts and shoppers, jumping over fallen merchandise, multiple, lightning fast trying of clothes...you get the idea: It is like a sanitized, urbanized obstacle course from a firm that provides concrete-jungle survival training. The activity is not only physical, it is also mental. It involves complex queuing strategies to minimize time spent in checking out as well as waiting for trial rooms, mental mathematics (how much is the total discount if I get an additional 10% on my card plus there is a 0.3% cashback on all purchases) and complex aesthetic dilemmas: whether this would go with that and does it match the cushions?

It is as you can see a complete workout for body, mind and soul.

Yes, the soul part kicks in with the satisfaction of the purchase (immediate) or the satisfaction of the non-purchase (delayed) and also by the fact that now she knows: the knowledge of this amorphous truth gives rise to an ephemeral, transcendental, inner stillness, a strange sort of peace that lasts until you meet someone who has seen something that you (she) haven't (hasn't) on sale.

My roles in all of this are manifold - a Consigliere ("Yes, this one does look better"), a Porter ("You go ahead I have the bags"), a Calculator ("25% on 2 for 3 and an additional 10% on your card comes to cheaper than the dress you saw in the other place"), a Friend ("Of course, we have a bit more time"), a Second ("Here's water for you, now you can go back in"), a Marker ("Hold my place in the queue" and me standing there holding a dress with large red flowers, getting glares from women who missed it), a Banker (" ")...

Excursions like these leave me a tired man.

I calculate percentage discounts in my sleep. My wife feels these are numbers from my day job.

I have nightmares where dresses chase me down dark alleys, grab hold of me and ask me what shoes they'd go with...It is a harrowing experience.

And then I had a brainwave. The Internet.

If we could shop online, we could save, if nothing else the physicality of shopping. We could do it while watching TV (I with the remote on my hand, she with the laptop in her lap). We could do it while both of us were with our laptops - I could check scores online while she did her shopping, I could of course give my sage comments from time to time and excel or the calculator would help with the calculations. Plus the shoes and existing wardrobe were at hand. No more feats of memory to recall how what looked. We could just pull it out of whatever nook or cranny it was secreted in and check.

I thought I had a winner.

Now all I had to do was to get her to back it.

And this is where I learnt the shopping equation I had quoted earlier. 99% experience 1% payment.

The internet superstreamlined the 1%. The 99% still asked the shopper to make a leap of faith in terms of what it would look like ("Under white light?" "Under yellow light?" "?!"), what it would feel like, what it would fall like, what it looked like on a rack and even what sort of people picked it up (This last bit of shopping I never suspected).

There was work to be done yet before my projected increase in TV time transformed into reality. I approached it stealthily. I had a plan.

Our first purchase was a vacation. Flight tickets, hotel rooms et al. It worked. My wife was happy that we went on a vacation. ("Finally!" as she said). Look Honey, no fraud.

We then ventured into the realm of clothing. We started small. Literally. We bought baby clothes. Standard sizes, standard colours, cute things written. Payment made, no fraud (again), delivery received.

It took three evenings (and two missed games), but then a convert is worth a thousand saints, so I persevered.

The leap to non-baby clothing took longer.

We went and tried a few websites. Looked at some stuff, even filled a shopping cart. And came off without buying because we were not convinced.

The non-shopping that we did online took the better part of all the evenings of a week. I was at a loss to counter this. We had dinners and lunches to get to the bottom of this non-purchase activity. It was then that I stumbled upon a rule of shopping. It is the Proximity Price Inversion Rule. Basically, it states that the desire to gain possession of an object is proportional to its proximity till a certain price. Beyond that price, the lure is higher if you cannot gain proximity to said object.

In short, if you can touch it, you want to buy it, till a certain price. Beyond that price, you want to buy it if you cannot touch it.

Most clothes unfortunately fall under the first part of the rule of proximity. I was in a muddle now. The evenings I had spent in getting the wife to browse and get hooked on looked like being an expense rather than an investment.

"I am certain it is cheaper here than in an actual shop. They pay no rent!"

"But they do have an actual shop here on which they do pay rent. They can't have stuff selling for higher in the same city."

"They can."

"But we'll pay shipping. So it will come to the same thing."

"I have a voucher for free shipping." I omitted to tell her that it was one time offer. Get her hooked on first.

"Anyway I can't buy something without trying it on first. I need to see how it feels."

And that was that.

Ultimately though she found a solution as always. It is the best of both worlds.

We went out shopping. We tried clothes and sizes and saw how the colours looked in different lights and saw the fall of the fabric and felt the feel of it.

Then we went home and ordered it online at leisure.

My leisure.