Battling the Rain

This year it’s my first proper encounter with the rain, as opposed to last year where I was in the hostel most of the time in Town – where it hardly ever rained as much as it did in the suburbs. Now that I’m the ’suburban mumbaikar’, I see how people keep the rain off, at home. It’s obvious that you sohuldn’t step out when it’s pissing down, but that’s not where it ends. Totally safe from the rain is when you’re home with windows shut and dirty blue or black plastic sheets put on the outside of the windows so that the rainwater doesn’t come in.

So we mounted acrylic sheets on the grill. And now we just sit by the window sil and enjoy the view! :)

Of Money and Violence

“I am the only kid who steals dollar bills from his mom’s wallet”, he proudly claimed. When I asked why he said, “So that I can buy a lot of violent toys. I keep collecting lots of dollar bills so that I can buy loads of violent toys with them”.
Earlier that day his mum asked him what ‘violent’ means. “Fighting and bashing up”, he replied promptly with a big smile on his face.

It was at that point that I was wondering how creepy it is. If it were just that once that he’d mentioned the ‘violent toys’, I guess I wouldn’t have been that freaked out. The whole day, he kept harping about violent toys and how he loves fighting and making his toys fight. So I asked him, “What about stuff like Lego? Don’t you like playing with Lego?”  His reply pleased me till he actually went on to elaborate on it. “Of course,” he said. “I love playing with Lego. But only the fighting figures – the guns and stuff. The other stuff is really boring”.

We try so hard to keep our kids away from ‘bad company’ and buy them toys so they can pass their time, as opposed to ‘mingling with the wrong crowd’. But the violence does seep in somehow, doesn’t it? Especially at a time like today where we find ourselves surrounded by in-your-face terror attacks. It’s all the more reason to unaccustom the children to the violence, I thought. But obviously, that’s not so. With toys and games aiming at an obsessive destruction, we’re making violence an everyday event.Maybe it’s just my paranoia that sees it as such a big problem, but the ‘fight’ bit of things just finds its way everywhere, especially in the lives of children. From cartoons to toys to glorification of victorious war stories in history books.

Television content is just so violent for children. It’s amazing to see small children glued to television watching something that defines a hero who readily bashes up the bad guy. The ‘hero’ is obviously stronger and armed with the better weapons, or equipped with better super powers. The bad guy is bad because he has a gun. But the good guy is better because he has a bigger gun to kill the bad guy with. What kind of twisted logic is that? If I were to merely transport this logic into the context of today, does it translate to ‘the guys with the ak-47s and grenades are bad, but the ones with the nuclear weapons are good’… So what if both are weapons of destruction!

We were heading back home and I took the stairs. He was waiting for the elevator – he had just begun to go in an elevator all by himself and jumped at any opportunity to use the elevator. The elevator was taking pretty long to come down and he was getting a little restless and impatient. He started kicking the wall and punching the elevator switch saying, “So you think you’re pretty strong, eh!” I was completely taken aback.

I guess it was partly because I’d been thinking about it all day yesterday. But it’s not completely untrue, right? After all, he’s just 6 years old!

Flights and Karma

Flights have this tendency to get delayed. This delay is often conspiratorially proportional to your urgency – the bigger the urgency, the more the delay.

My previous episode of a delayed flight timed itself such that at every stage of progress towards home, there was a postponement that kept telling me, “You should’ve just taken a train to Delhi”. Now I’m all set to rush to Bombay for a meeting on Thursday evening and I say, “Ok. Let’s not rush this one, and I’ll reach Bombay on Wednesday night”. But delay jumped out from behind the corner at a time when the flight was just about to take off. We moved from the bay to the runway and a while after waiting to take off, we find ourselves heading back to bay. A few minutes later, the ground staff is seen flashing lights at the wing of the airplane. And the stewardess announces,”Kingfisher regrets the delay caused. One of the passengers has spotted birds in the wing of the airplane and we had to head back to bay”.

I guess it doesn’t matter what airlines you take. Last time it was Indigo and this time it was Kingfisher. It’s just luck that determines how late you’re going to get. Maybe there’s some karmic understanding between the urgency and the delay which translates itself into flight schedules. Who knows!

But at least this delay was for a good cause. And the birds flew happily ever after.