'Parental Guidance'

The secret of great parenting, well err, let’s put it this way…remains a secret.??

Because , no matter how noble your intentions be , for some unfathomable reason, the good parenting code seems to elude you while the whole world seems to have cracked it. At least that’s what their social media pages tell you. Because everyone else’s kid seems to be topping exams, getting felicitated by the President , winning gold medals, guest-blogging on national dailies, attending student exchange programs at Harvard, and landing jobs at McKinsey or Goldman. Sigh !

?Jokes aside. Let’s accept it – most of us suck at parenting! Not because we are dorks. But because it is a damn complicated game, where, by the time you learn all the rules, you realize you are too old to play. Or at least your kids are too old for your late wisdom. Most of us grow up sniggering at the gaffes of our parents and most of us grow old by overtaking them with our own . Either by being extremely hands-off, or by being embarrassingly intrusive. And one fine day, the kids are not kids anymore, but adults . Warts and all.

As someone who became a parent at a very young age, I obviously ticked all possible boxes on the screw-up list. When my daughter was a toddler, I’d joke that I see her grow ‘horizontally’, meaning that she’d be sleeping in the morning when I’d leave for work & she’d again be sleeping by the time I was back.

?And so, in April 2007, as my daughter turned eight , I decided to start penning an annual blog post for her on her birthday every year. Truth be told, it stated on pretentious premise, as I was more concerned about putting up an article on blogosphere to impress my readers, rather than aspiring to mold her thinking with what I considered to be a dad’s wisdom. As the years went by, I did try to get more authentic . Sometimes I liked what I wrote. At other times I cringed . Like any annual post, my article would mostly be a derivative of my reading and personal experiences leading to it in that particular year. Fads, clichés, all.

?(Curiously , 2007 was also the tipping point where my generation felt its first tremors of the Supernova about to change the course of mankind. ?Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and simultaneously disrupted the worlds of computing , telecommunications & entertainment , forever. The same year, Facebook stepped out of a campus and became the new global community, redrawing the global social structure of human beings in ways unimaginable before that. Soon, Twitter came along. As did GitHub, Hadoop, Android and others. Uber and Air Bnb followed. The cloud was born. IBM started working on its Watson project - and for the first time ever, AI stepped out of academics and Science Fiction, to trespass into our personal lives and make serious commercial strides. Like Tom Friedman rightly said, 2007 was the crossroads for modern mankind where, for the first time in his existence, man started falling behind the technological advancement curve that he himself was responsible for , and as a result, he started losing his ability to predict or imagine his future like he could, till a century ago.)

?Coming back to my parenting story. I carried on with my annual post for a few years & then gave it up, not wanting to embarrass my growing-up daughter . And while in recent years, I tried to make up for my mistakes of being an absentee parent, my relationship with her today is like between two adults. My daughter grew up, like children usually do. The other day I was trying to think of what possibly could I write in a post today, if I had to, as a dad’s advice to a daughter. Today I have access to more information than ever before . And yet, I have never been more unsure and lost like I am today . I have no means to articulate a future and transcribe it in words for her, because I have no clue about where we are headed. Yes, what I could possibly do is try to take stock of our collective past and draw out some universal truths from it, which may serve as a ready reckoner for her as she starts her life, hopefully making less mistakes than I did. Here are some things that come to my mind.

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• The primary business of life is thinking. Not ‘what’ to think, but ‘how’ to think.
• That voice in your head is not as powerful as you think. Step behind & observe the voice & you’ll see that it is repeating either of these two kinds of thoughts - self-harming ( negative / pessimistic/fearful, etc) , or externally focused (envy / judgment / condemnation / anger /impatience, etc). You can always command it to shut up & it obeys.
• If it’s an important idea, take a pen & write it down on paper.
• Curiosity ( about ideas, not people) is the best life management tool as you grow older.
• Knowing what not to do is a superpower.
• Doing nothing is the most underrated strategy for effectiveness. If you can sit quietly & observe your boredom without rushing to do something ‘meaningful’, you’re making progress.
• Time is of no essence for someone with clarity of thought & audacity of faith.
• ‘I shall be happy when..’ is a trap. Start with being happy, the rest follows.
• Fear is the mother of all evils. Always examine if your prayers are your fears in disguise. Nip fear in the bud whenever you see it surfacing.
• The world of effects is a time-lagged ‘result’ and is not potent for change. All our struggles arise because we try to change a result whose cause is in the past. Or, to borrow Neville’s words –‘The specious surface of fact reflects rather than discloses’.
• It won’t happen in the way you’re imagining it. You can only plant a ‘first cause’ & leave it there. The secondary & tertiary causes that will bring it forth are not in your control. Stop micromanaging the universe.
• Trust & faith are not the same. Trust succeeds an actual event. Faith needs to precede it. Read this again.
• The clever one reasons inductively, i.e. he lets precedence triumph over principle. The wise one reasons deductively, i.e. she holds? principle over precedence.
• In prayer, you talk to God. In intuition, God talks to you. Pay attention – life is always whispering something in your ears.
• It’s not our vices but our virtues that terrify us, Because they remind us of the infinite potential we had but never reached out for.
• A barrier is the first milestone of progress.
• Life is your present moment. Be friendly with it & life will be friendly with you.
• Knowledge by itself is not of much value. Yes, intellectual assimilation of knowledge is essential for instantaneous retrieval of wisdom as and when you are ready for it.
• The world is made of two kinds of people. The first kind is always trying to look for a resolution in a conflict. The second kind is always trying to look for a conflict in a resolution. The former thrives in peace, the latter – in chaos.
• The most scenic views show up during missed turns. The best destinations show up after U-turns.

?Growing up makes us self-conscious. We get scared of public opinion, of ridicule. We play to not lose instead of playing to win. We start living to not die, and we stop living to live. Like we used to. At age six. Wearing a ridiculous red cape on our shoulders and diving into the air. Imagining that one day we won’t fall back on earth, because we genuinely believed we could fly. Who knows, maybe we could have. Maybe we just stopped trying ? Or stopped believing ?

?Stop growing up like everyone else. Live frugally with an ounce of wonder & a ton of faith.

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(Ayon's Blog? - 29th Aug'23). Please feel free to leave your thoughts.

(‘ Life as unusual – Work as usual’? , my new book, is available on Amazon, and trending among the top titles in its category on Amazon India. Would you like to check it out for yourself & / or gift it to a friend / colleague? You may click on the link below to order. Thanks!)

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