Shilpa Roy Kota

Imagine going on a relaxing bike drive with friends and family.  Everyone is driving together at the same speed.  It is a little cramped on the road,  but still a lot of fun.

Somewhere along the road, you get news about an urgent task that needs your attention (could be work related or personal). You immediately change gear and speed off in the direction of your task.

Soon you have left the big gang of people behind and are alone speeding faster
and faster.  In a while you get tired and lonely, but there is no one around to offer comfort. You keep moving along at the same speed,  hoping your friends and family will soon catch up with you.  They don’t catch up and you feel even more dejected.

Eventually one day you finish the task, you had set out to do. You are happy for the accomplishment but there is no one to celebrate the success with. You blame your family for not being there with you in this big moment.

After a few lonely years of blaming others for your lonliness, you give up your ego, forgive them and start searching for them. You go back the road you were once travelling with them, but you can’t find them anywhere. You remember the turns you took on the road but have no way of knowing which turns they took.

Even  though you achieved whatever you set out for, you are no longer happy. As you trace your steps back, somewhere on the road, you realise what went wrong.  If only you had communicated with your group before you set off, if only you had left markers along the way for someone to follow,  if only you had taken atleast one person along, if only you had not taken so long to retrace your steps;  life could’ve been a lot different.

Life is never about a choice between personal ambitions and family life. We can have both of these as long as we communicate and make time to take a few loved ones along, or at least leave marks on the road so that they can follow.

pavankota:

When you are going on a long leave and you are very happy!

The softness of his hand, the smell of his skin

The sparkle in his eyes, that toothless grin

The soft, hairy cheeks, the silken hair

The fingers that curl around mine saying I will always be there

The sound of his burp, the shape of his nose

The tiny feet with long slender toes

The curdled milk on his freckled face

The peaceful sleep amidst the craze

On his birth day, I got this present

Wrapped in white blankets, straight from heaven

With this gift, my life’s complete 

What else could anyone give that could mean more than this.

My eight year old daughter and I went shopping yesterday to buy her a long promised gift. She wanted to buy a newly introduced toy which she had seen on the internet. I had no clue what it was and was hoping never to find it in the small, unorganized toy shops of Hyderabad. I was, of course, dead wrong.

As we entered the shop, the toy collection was right in front of the door. Obviously, it was the highest in demand, to get the center stage position in the shop. The minute I saw the collection, I regretted not doing my research online and promising my darling that I will buy it for her (if it was within a certain budget). After all, what could possibly go wrong with a toy.

The toy she wanted is part of a collection called Monster High. It is a collection of dolls featuring ghost characters with scary teeth, wings and skeletons. To imagine how they look, try and visualize Dracula in lady form. I was shocked, first to think why the hell would Toy makers create something so monstrous and then to think, why the hell, my daughter, who was till date living in the world of Princesses and Barbies, suddenly switch to the world of skeletons, ghosts and blood! All these years, she fantasized about being a princess and it scared me out of my wits to imagine her now starting to fantasize about being a monster!

I tried to reason with her explaining she had so many dolls and she could try something else. She remained adamant on buying this latest toy. In the end, I admitted to her that I did not life this toy because I didn’t like monsters. Monsters were scary and could cause her bad dreams in the night. She looked at me incredulously and asked “But why do you think monsters are scary? After all, they look so much like us humans!” 

I was caught completely off guard. Her openness of thought and acceptance of all creatures (even monsters included) was at a level which I can never hope to match. I, as an adult, could differentiate between good and bad, beautiful and ugly but she, at her age, couldn’t care less about it. For her, it was just a new toy. 

The next time, I meet a monster, I hope I remember not to be scared of him. After all 90 percent of him would still look like me only! 🙂

Mom visited me recently and as usual we sat for hours together talking about nothing and everything. While I struggle to juggle between the needs of a grown kid and an infant, the foremost thought that kept going on in my mind was – How did my Mom bring up three children all born within a span of 4 years? And along with that clean the house, cook meals, tend to an ageing mother in law, stitch, sew and even socialize. She is not gifted with any super power and we, of course, were not super behaved kids. Then how??? How could she, and perhaps all Moms of that time, achieve this miracle, while I struggle with it daily, even though I have half the responsibilities she had. In addition, I have ten times more technology and environmental support systems in place to help me bring up my kids. 

When I finally asked her, she just looked at me with a confused look (as if wondering – why was I asking such a silly question) and said “Pata nahin, bas kar liya”. (Don’t know how we did it, but we just did). I, who was look for some silver bullet answers to solve my problems, did not appreciate this response. There must be something that moms of that age did, that I was not getting right. Was it something they ate, or something they wore or something they fed the children? I really had to find the answer behind the miracle.

After more persistent probing, she finally admitted that life was tough for them too, but they didn’t have time to worry about it. Perhaps even more important, they didn’t have a choice but to take on all the responsibilities. That made me think that the reason I considered my life difficult was because I had the luxury of time to think about it. More so, I had a string of friends and relatives, ready to pamper me and listen to my woes. This constant attention actually put me in the sympathy zone and encouraged me to cry about my life all the more. 

One simple solution, therefore, to make life easy would be to make it so tough, that I simply didn’t have any time to think about how difficult it was. Or another solution could be, to close doors to all well meaning ears and face my problems myself. Either solution doesn’t seem appealing to me and I am pretty sure I could never adopt either one of them. So till such time that the miracle doesn’t happen for me, I choose to believe that moms of that age were truly blessed with some super power and perhaps if I was devoted enough to my children, I would find that super power too, someday!

P.S: I was proudly showcasing a fancy mobile crib to my mother. This gadget has cute toys hanging from it. It rotates above the crib with music and keeps the child entertained. When I asked my Mom, how did she keep her children entertained, she said “We used to tie colorful balloons from the fan!”

Life sometimes is so simple!

As an organization, we impart a lot of training programs. As a trainer, I have always encouraged people to ask questions. I believed that there are no wrong questions, just wrong answers. Questions by their very nature are right and will always lead us to learn new things.

Since the last few weeks, I have been forced to think differently. A very common question that well meaning aunties have been constantly posting to me is – How much milk does Yog drink? (Yog is my two month old son). Whenever faced with this question, I am at a complete loss of words. Here’s why – 

1. I have never tried to measure how much milk he drinks

2. Even if I tried, it is impossible to measure the total amount, especially when you are breastfeeding

3. And even if I was, by some miracle, able to measure, how would it help to know how much he drinks?

Can anyone gauge if my son was healthy and happy just by the amount of milk he drinks? Among other things, his birth weight, the number of feeds he takes, the amount of reflux he has, his level of daily activity, the average weight gain over a period time, are some basic parameters to measure his wellness. But they never ask any one of these other questions, so they can never determine the correct answer.

I have, therefore, come to believe that asking one independent question without having the relevant background or context in place is actually more dangerous than not asking the question at all. Thinking more on this line, I realized society, in general, runs on such standard questions, which actually mean nothing, but are so much a part of our regular life. Some examples –

To determine how successful someone is – How much salary does he get? Well, Narayan Murthy gets Re 1 per annum as salary. Can he be termed Not Successful?

To determine how good a product was – How many defects were found in this product? If the answer was 3000 defects, can anyone tell whether it was a good piece of development or not?

I think we ask such questions to pretend that we care about the person, product or event. In fact, we don’t really care and we just want to form an opinion quickly.

A wrong question, by default, will beget a wrong answer. Going forward, as a trainer, before I answer the questions, I will try to help the audience form the questions correctly. But as a mother of an infant, I don’t have that luxury. So the next time, someone asks me, “How much milk he drinks?”, my answer will be “He drinks enough for what his body needs”.

I am blessed to have a 1 month old in my arms and as you may have guessed. most blogs going forward, for some time at least, will be based on inspirations provided by him. So here goes –

Most of our waking time together is spent feeding and being fed. As a mother, it took me precious days and weeks to figure out his feeding patterns and simple cues he gives to communicate with me. Once he is hungry he starts by licking his lips, followed by hand in his mouth, then turning his head from side to side in search of milk and the final cue (for the Mom who is silly enough not to catch any of the above) – Howling!! Once the feeding starts, he sucks as if the world is about to fall apart in the next five seconds and then as fast as the process started, it ends! And then starts the magical time called – Burp Time! 

For those who have not been so fortunate to feed a baby and experience the nuances of this skill, I will provide some explanation. As a baby drinks milk, along with the milk a lot of air also flows into the small tummy. This air tends to fill the stomach giving the feeling of fullness to the infant. The baby stops drinking thinking he is full, when it is hardly the case. This air needs to be rubbed out of the stomach through various techniques (which I am still figuring out myself). Once the air comes out, it makes a loud sound called a Burp and the baby starts feeding again! This is the most magical sound that a mother can ever experience as it tells that the feeding process has been successful so far and is all set to continue!

As I burped Yog today, I realized it is not only infants who need burps. They might need burps only while drinking milk, but we as adults need burps from the life around us. For example, like Yog, we all latch onto our work with such speed and passion, as if, we only have the next one day to live. Then of course, the speed of work fills up everything inside us and makes us feel completely full, with no space in our mind or heart to absorb anything further. We get stressed, frustrated and extremely tired thinking we have failed midway. We then force ourselves to believe that we need to work harder and harder. In the process, we keep getting fuller and fuller till we are ready to explode.

If only, we realized that like the tiny infant stomach, all our body parts including the brain and the heart only have limited space. When we experience the fullness, it doesn’t mean we have failed. It just means we need to stop for a while, give a few decent pats on the back or taps on the heads (whichever is deserved), and do whatever it takes to take out the accumulated air in our system. Once we have practiced burping ourselves a couple of times, we would have hopefully mastered the art and may even be able to experience the magic of it.

Next time someone tells me that they need a break, I am most likely going to tell them that they just need a burp. I think this term summarizes the issue more appropriately. 🙂