Friday, July 06, 2012

Little Rascals

Like every girl secretly loves a bad boy, mothers love a crazy kid; they really do! Although I have no opinion on, or solution to, the best way to deal with a crazy kid, in the last post of the second series of ideas, here’s how I feel about growing up crazy: it’s like looking back at the four years of high school.

Situations that seemed like the end of the world back then are things we laugh our heads off at today—like that one time my best friend got pissed-drunk in the school auditorium, in broad daylight, in an Islamic country and slept through all of the classes. Fun times, now. Horrid times, then.

Would I like to go back and experience all of that again? No, thank you. I’ll pass. Some incidents are best experienced once and recounted loads of times. It just works best that way. I’m sure my mom will agree to this, in context of experiencing the sheer madness of bringing up three absolute brats, in their own right.

So with this I’d like to thank everyone who came to me with full gusto to recount some truly funny, and outrageously gory kiddy incidents. Let’s say a little pray so our kids don’t turn out to be anything like we were. I love you guys.

And, oh, let’s hope they aren’t too cute. ‘Cause how can you ever scream at anything that looks like this:

;)

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

What's in a name, anyway?

Rusti was born and brought up in a multilingual household. Gujarati was his first language but English took over on most occasions—and Hindi came into the picture by default.

When he was about seven or eight, Rusti was asked to write an essay about his daddy for Hindi class. So he began collating his thoughts and structuring his essay to the best of his linguistic abilities. After he was done, he marched up to his parents—rather pleased with his devanagari—and asked them to have a look at what he had penciled down.

The first few lines of the essay went something like this: mera pitaji mujhhe gamta hain, main uske saath ramta hain. (I like my daddy, I play with him). Though the intention behind the thought was extremely noble, Rusti had decided to ignore but a few small details—like the facts that gamta (to like) and ramta (to play) were Gujarati words that had no business appearing in his Hindi essay.

Remembering to bring these facts to his notice later, the parents continued to read the essay. Rusti finally decided to introduce his daddy’s name in the last line of the essay.

Mera pitaji ka naam hain Ketan.

But his daddy’s name is Cyrus! This confused the parents to no extent, and they confronted Rusti about what he meant by naming his daddy’s best friend as his father!

To which Rusi nonchalantly replied, “But daddy, your name is so difficult to write in Hindi. Ketan is so much easier!”

Monday, July 02, 2012

Crack-a-lackin!

My brothers were about eleven and nine when they moved to Bombay. Any thing intrigues kids that age, but everything in this new city was of interest to these two. My eldest brother often ran down the street from my granny’s house to go pet the cow by the garbage bin. For him, there could not be anything cooler than a live cow on the street, nonchalantly mooing and munching in the middle of all the chaos, completely oblivious to the world.

Later in the year, we moved to our new house, and then came Diwali. The festival of lights! Since it was going to be their first experience of an Indian festival, mum and dad decided to get them loads of crackers—rasi bombs, anars, chakras, phuljharis, the works. 

Evidently, their excitement knew no bounds; they ran from pillar to post screaming with delight. The night the festivities began, they lugged their huge bag-full-of things-to-blow-up down to where all the other building’s kids were. Out came the crackers and the madness began. 

After a while, my eldest brother picked an exceptionally long string of red crackers and looked at it with new-found interest. Though everyone spread those on the ground and were lighting 'em at a good one arm’s distance, what a silly conventional way of doing things that was! Completely not his style.

He called out to the second one to discuss a better way of lighting that string of awesome.  And then, like an epiphany, it happened. There it was, the shiny, brand new, double door to the D wing/bungalow of our building.

So they simply marched over to the door, secured the long string of crackers to the door knocker, and lit the thing of fire. 

I’m going to leave what happened to that poor door to your imagination.

Well, as my mom says, something good did come out of that incident. After all the yelling, screaming and complaining had subsided, mum made her first building friend in the aunty who lives behind the door my brothers almost burned down. 

Aren’t they the cutest? *Heart*

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