Growing up with my daughter

My father never imposed his will on both my sister or me. We were free to choose the school we wanted to go to - Rosary School, which was 15 Kms away from where we lived as opposed to St Ursula, Nigdi, which was just four kms away. The courses we chose while in college and the people we chose to become. I am pretty damn sure he would have been happier if I had joined Telco instead of a startup and if my sister would have studied to be a engineer.  I can only begin to imagine how he managed those thousands he required to let us imagine what we wanted, for the hundreds of books I bought and for the subscriptions and the flights of fancy he funded. For a man limited by his own need to be free, he seemed to have a sense of what was good and what was not.

I have tried to emulate him in the last 4 years and 8 months. My daughter is allowed to break things, tear up newspapers, paint the floor, play in the mud and act like an excited puppy. She has discovered books she likes and things she wants to do. Has begun to draw Dragons ( her favourite ) and choose the movies she wants to watch. She helps me fine tune the nursery rhyme she will recite at school - Her contribution to Grey Squirrel - a poem she chose when we browsed together for things that would be interesting for her. When we found a little poem Grey Squirrel interesting but just a bit too short, she helped in adding the lines by about how the grey squirrel runs up the trees so tall but never ever falls.

Sundays are the days when I pretend I can coax a little bit of baking out of a 5 year old convection microwave oven. Influenced by Nigella and Racheal Allen and an overdose of the TLC channel, I involve her in the baking. So far she has sat patiently and asked questions on why eggs need to be added and why milk and butter and sugar need to be beaten and has helped in sifting flour - plain old atta - with baking powder and cocoa powder and has stood around watching the final product rise slowly and brown and then pestered me for a slice even before the cake has cooled.

This sunday we got a little ambitious and allowed Tamara to bake her own cake. While I grated apples and ground cinnamon for a light apple cinnamon cake, she mixed the flour with a bit of oats and then with cocoa powder and then added butter and sugar and milk and whisked up a sticky gooey slop. She patiently mixed and mixed and mixed and finally decided that it needed an egg - I had to help get the egg out of the shell and into her pan. Thereafter she mixed it further to make a fine mess, which she called a mud pie. I had to convince her to allow me to use an handblender and sprinkle a few raisins into it just for some fun :).

We baked it in a tin she buttered and dusted - it had more flour than required but then she will learn as she goes along. And along came a cake that was nice - nice for a almost 5 year old.  The forty minutes were agonized over why the cake is not jumping and if the eggs would break or if there is a possibility of an omlette instead of the cake.

After 45 minutes we had a springy moist dense cake, we decided not to wait for the cake to cool ( as usual) and sliced it and smothered it with some more chocolate 'sauce' and gobbled it up

The cinnamon cake I baked in her words was ok :(

happy banana republic

It is now 62 years since the idea of India exists. Hastily patched together by browbeating princely states and dividing on the basis of language, a nation was born. Also born alongside was a Cello Tape Nation - a jugaad of gigantic proportions.  We are a nation that will stumble and fall and yet at the slightest provocation pull out our thousand year culture and wisdom of the saints and gods and mortals all combined into a bhel puri of identity.

And we are a banana republic! An additional collector is burnt alive by a mafia in a small town around 300 kms from Mumbai. One third of the country is not ruled by the Government of India but by rebels who are better armed, trained and equipped than the people who are supposed to the Law of the country. The wife of a supposed dissenting voice gets arrested by the ATS while people who bombed, maimed and killed are running training schools for future terrorists. Three metros in the country has disfunctional roads, the national capital is also the rape capital of the country, the sparkling new hub of new economy India has a reputation where women are asked to get back home before it gets dark, traffic cops never man the signal, instead hide behind parked police vans only to dance onto the roads when anyone breaks a signal by mistake. Gandhi is a thousand rupee note, a half blind politician runs a broadcast mafia down south. His crony walked away with more money than the GDP of a small African nation. We have a prime minister who is learned but cannot take decisions, a beaurocracy that demands 25 lakhs for sanction for a lift in a building. There are more exploited kids at any signal in Mumbai than there are schools, the government makes people who want to build schools jump hoops for permissions. The gap between people who have money and the ones that live a month on less than the cost of a fine dining meal is widening.  I could go on and on.

And this morning I woke up at six and wondered if I should switch on the TV to watch the annual parade - decided against it. Why bother? when all that shiny hardware cannot get rid of the people who are ruining a fine subcontinent.

measured against the cost of a cup of coffee

Six months ago my daughter started regular school. We had trawled around 20 school starting from the Ryan Global at Andheri Lokhandwala to Don Bosco at Borivli. Our idea of schools is rather old world. I studied at a family run private school called Rosary School in Pune and my wife at the St Ursula School in Nigdi. Both schools did not have airconditioning, did not have new age labs nor new education methods. When we started talking to schools in Mumbai, the first turn off was when the lady at the reception asked us if we could afford a deposit of a couple of lakhs, refundable at the end of the child's school term - and no, interest would not be paid on the deposit. The others wanted to sell a lifestyle to us, one even claimed that our girl would not have to interact with the middle class kids and would not learn their manners! We settled for Maneckji Cooper School at Juhu. And that caused a rather odd problem - it takes 90 minutes to reach the school from where we live. We decided to move and till we found a new home (we did find one eventually) closer to the school, she would use my car - her grandmother found a driver who is from the church she goes to every week.

Our driver is an odd man. He used to drive a tempo - he drives the car like he would drive a tempo even today after 6 months. He has three children - a daughter who is married and two sons who have dropped out of school. He stays in a 'kholi' - a one room dwelling close to where I live. I call my driver odd because he always has some relative who in his words - off ho gaya - the closest translation is the relative has passed away - the 'off' signifying the 'switching off ' of the relative. So far 8 of them have switched off and each time he has wanted an advance. Usually half his salary around the 15th of his month. A month ago I finally asked him how many of his relatives are left? He did not say much, when I asked him if everything was fine with him, he told me about Rs 10000 he had borrowed from some marwadi, and that he had to pay Rs 500 every month as interest. I used to pay him 6500 a month at that time - the amount he asked for. If he paid 500 to the marwadi, he would have Rs 6000 left for the month - Rs 200 a day for a family of 3. Measured against two cups of coffee at the Costa Coffee Shop a day, his family lives on as much as what I pay a month for coffee!

Its a no hope situation - two sons - both dropped out of school when the failed their exams. They do nothing - no hope because there is no way for them to complete their education. We decided to help him pay off his debt. Increased his salary so that he can repay spread over a year or so. The next question was whether I could give up half the cups of coffee a month and use that money to pay for the two kid's education. I am not sure if I want to do it. I am not sure if I want to take that commitment. What if they waste that money? And are really not interested in studying? On the other hand what if they do study and get some part-time jobs and raise their living above the desperation they are in.

It is like investing in a uncharted startup.

Any suggestions would be welcome.