The Parent Rant

Marriages are highly over-rated. Decades of movies, urban legends, smart-alec friends and whatsapp forwards have played bogeyman to make us wary of marriages. “Your life will change”, “You’ll lose all your freedom”, “You’ll lose all your friends from the opposite sex”, “You can change your boss when you change your job, but you can’t change your spouse” (well, at least not that easily). Hogwash! I married my high school sweetheart four years back, after eight years of courtship; and you know what?? Nothing changed! In hindsight, it could be because I was always this one-woman, miserly, conservative and boring chap whose idea of a good time is hogging food at a roadside stall – but meh!

But you know what really changes your life? Parenthood. Imagine life as a roller-coaster – marriage is just a slow upward climb where you’re being pushed ahead by creaking levers and gears. Parenthood is what comes after that pause on top. It can be scary, exciting, scream-invoking, puke-inducing or all of them together… almost simultaneously.

Parenthood can be quite revealing too. No, I’m not talking about your personal inadequacies. When you become a parent, you suddenly realise everything that is wrong with the world – Salary hikes which aren’t big enough to impact your standard of living but are just enough to put you into the next tax bracket; taxes that make you feel that when you go on a date, you are taking the government with you; traffic where everyone wants to go somewhere but eventually no one goes anywhere; processions for events as prosaic as weddings and as preposterous as an India-Bangladesh match; hyper-active festival celebrations which all look, feel and sound the same. Suddenly you can feel every draught that passes through the hinges of your door because your baby feels the chill and a shiver runs down your spine!

One of the first things I realised after becoming a parent two months back (Thank you! Thank you!) was this:India is an incredibly noisy country! From the neighbourhood aunties who shout from their balconies everything from their prospective lunch menu to their husband’s persistent rash, to the roadside romeo who’ll faithfully honk his horn every time he passes by the house of his newest beloved; from the TV sets that are sold as much on the loudness of the speakers as they are on the clarity of the picture, to mobile phones that ensure that every living organism in a 200m radius knows when a call comes in – This country believes in keeping everything loud & unclear.

My latest gripe is regarding toys; toys for infants and toddlers, to be precise. Why do they have to be so loud? Why must all my neighbours know that my kid is listening to Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars? Why can’t I have a peaceful (or even a comprehensible) conversation while my kid is playing her latest toy? What makes this worse is that gradually, this cacophony becomes competitive. The latest toy has to be louder than the last one. In fact, it has to be louder than any other noise-making apparatus in the whole vicinity! Things have come to such an end that parents shake the toy to see what kind of sound (who are we kidding? Noise) it creates before they buy it. It’s a bat!! A cricket bat!! It’s not supposed to rattle!!

We as a nation must break this vicious circle of noise so that my child can sleep in peace; so that I can sleep… at last! Please!

(This article was printed in the Sunday edition of Vadodara's Loksatta-Jansatta newspaper (January 08, 2017). My first ever news article. :-))