Shut that kid up. Please.

Have you been on a plane travel where a kid shrieks through the whole journey and generally makes life miserable for everyone else?
That kid would be mine.



Maybe, You feel that I ought to be spending time bringing up my kid right. And you wouldn't be terribly wrong. My personal belief about parenting is this. To be a good parent all you need to know about kids are where does the stuff go in and where does it come out. (Hint: It is the same as in adult species) Of course, I have spent some time in instilling good morals like you need to take care of your parents when they are old and stuff like that. But I consider my purchase of a plot in a nearby retirement village as the best investment in my life.

But all these tantrums of my kid has driven me to concede the fact maybe, I was wrong. So I decided to learn about good parenting from the best source possible. I turned to the kid's grandmother - my mother. I left the kid with him last sunday and went to the book shop in the neighbouring mall.

There is something wrong about a parenting book that says,'The author is a professor emuritus in MIT.' I would reather buy a book that says in its preface,'The author is mother of a professor emuritus in MIT'. But I am guessing those mothers are busy watching day time television and don't have time to write parenting books. Too bad! I would have really liked to know how to raise a money making machine. I don't have high opinion of Hillary Clinton's book, 'It takes a village to raise a child.' either. 'No! It takes a village to keep your husband happy.', I would like to point to her.

According to me, Parenting books is the second biggest racket in publishing world. The biggest one is of course, Self-help books. There is not a single good self help that is worth reading. Trust me. I have read all of them! And I have got this to say that creep who wanders from self-help section to the parenting section in the book shop, 'You Loser! Quit following me!'

Quote of the Day:As a father, I am not able to get around to this fact. But Philip II must have really really loved his son to name him Alexander the Great.

From Funny Side Of Life

Parenting - Now and then

It's a perfect sunday. Sleeping City, lazy sun and.. a kid eating Lays chips for breakfast in the opposite balcony. The problem with today's kids is the same as what their parents faced thirty years back - Bad parents.

Thirty years back parents were over interfering. They decided everything for their kids - from under wear color to under graduation degree.
As a teenager how many times have you had this conversation with your mom?

"Why are you buying light color undies? They will get dirty fast. And then you will ask me to wash them."

If you are teenager with a dirty stain in your undie, maybe mom is the last person you would turn to. But how are you going to explain it to her? So you end up with dozen undies - all black in color!

It might be hard to imagine now. But back then there were no malls and just one boring television channel. So kids were the only entertainement for parents. We all have painful memories of these conversations from our childhood.

"Ma, Shall I watch T.V? Gavaskar is on fire. He is scoring three runs every over!"
"Why don't we quickly revise science lessons one last time. Tell me who discovered Oxygen."

"Shall we go out and eat?"
"But I have made bindi fry. For your maths olympiad next week."

"Ma! I want to go to friend's house."
"Why don't you watch Chintu till I bathe babloo. He keeps crawling under the bed. Also give complan to Pinky, pleeeassee."
Yeah.. Most of the times kids were the source of entertainement. But regularly they were products too.

Now the situation has gone to the other extreme. Kids get to decide from what they should have for breakfast (Lays chips) to which channel we should watch (POGO). I am talking about kids who can't even clean up after themselves!

Nowadays parents give their kids a long leash because they want to be away from the kids. We want kids to be on their own because we want to be left alone! We hope that if we just allow them to do what they want to do they will allow us to do what we want to do - stare at facebook wall, browse.

Today's parents attitude to their kids can be summed by the attitude of a blogger I know...
'Holy shit! The brat has a scissors and my yellow T. shirt in his hand. Wait a minute! I don't have an yellow shirt. Oh, It is just a blouse! Thank God. I really wanted to finish this post."
I hope your attitude towards your kid is different from mine.

PS:
Peronally, I am OK with the chips-for-breakfast thing. I know my kid might become obese. But my policy is if it doesn't kill the kid like NOOOOWWWW then don't disturb me. But the POGO thing, I can't take it. I put my foot down and tell my kid, "You know where to find me if you want me. I will be in the bedroom watching star movies in the small T.V. "

Quote of the day:
The doctor said the first moments of our kid will be our greatest experience. He was right! It was just downhill from the time we conceived our kid.

From Funny Side Of Life

Letter from a father to his son

I know you can't read yet. And I know I don't write well either. But the things that has to be done now must not wait for the skills that can be learned later.

When you start reading this letter you might get this fancy idea, I can't imagine how but you just might, that this situation is like that popular Hindi movie and you are that cute little kid ..

Well, stop thinking those things because the kid in the movie was way more cute than you.



Then you might wonder why I am taking the trouble of writing a letter when I can just tell you what I want to say to your face. But the problem with the real world is, you can't always tell what you want to say to a person's face. Especially to a kid's face. And sometimes you really don't want to say anything. You just want to..

Let's talk about the time you dropped the digital camera and broke it. In the real world, I can't slap you across the face or, I am going to leave this sentence trailing by putting those cute little dots because even in Internet world one has to be cautious as some crackpot may read this and get crazy ideas and I might be charged as an accessory for aggravated assault, ..

In the real world what I am supposed to say when you dropped the camera is, "Oh, that was my mistake! I should not have kept it in the top shelf beyond your reach, well hidden behind all those clothes. It just raised your curiosity. You had to see whether it would break if you drop it. So, you waited till I went to the toilet and.. I totally understand. It was my fault."

But it was after you dropped the camera that we remembered we had neither seen nor copied the photos of the costly vacation that we took couple of months back. So while you are sleeping the sleep of the contented person who has done his day's duty and your mother is uploading all the pictures to that place in Internet where all the vacation pictures go and sending invites, I have entered a philosophical mood.

Is it odd that I have time to see the vacation photos of friends, acquaintances and strangers and make a list of places to go, sights to see and things to do but have no time to enjoy the memories of places I went, sights I saw and things I did?

I do not want to finish this letter in a philosophical note. So here is a piece of advice to you, my son.

Don't turn me into a philosopher. Stop breaking my stuff.

From Funny Side Of Life

If you liked this post, please consider for subscribing to my posts by email. You will also get a free copy of my comedy play 22,going on 33.

If you liked this post, you may also like You've got iPhone? Guess what I've got .

I love my kid. But..

I love him. I really do. The only thing I love even more is his school. Because when he is there he is not at home! So I don't mind them putting a straw into me to suck my blood regularly. It's a fair deal, I think. So, for all the parents who has a kid who is not ready to go to school yet, just hang in there. Hope is around the corner. But better up stock up some money because you will need it.

Why kids are the way they are can be scientifically explained by applying murphy's law to mendel's genetics. Mendel proved that the genes of offspring are inherited from parents. The single important outcome of that discovery is lawsuits are filed and won by father against mother when a blue eye kid is born to two brown eyed parents.  But mendel didn't know this particular application of his discovery. If he had, he would have patented his findings.
Murphy's law states that "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." It has not been accepted as a scientific law like Newton's Law, Hooke's law and Sairam's law is mainly because the fifty page proof submitted by the author to the Science congress was misplaced by the postal department and Murphy himself died a couple of days later hit by the very postal van that carried his proof to some wrong destination. Later attempts to prove Murphy's law has resulted in similar fate.

When kids draw their genes (and hence behavior) from parents they have a chance of drawing the good or bad genes. But when you apply Murphy's law to Mendel's inheritance model you immediately know that the kid will draw just the bad genes from both the parents. So when an intelligent brute marries a dumb blond the kid is likely to be, no not Bush, a dumb brute.

And that's the reason why parents can't stand their kids. They know that the worst behavior of their kids has come from nowhere but themselves. And they cannot do anything but wait till the kid grows up and mellows down under society's hard rules.

And one more thing, don't use expletives in front of the kid. Kids constantly observe you and are worse than a parrot when it comes to repeating you.