We become what we do not want

Shakuntala Devi (Hindi; 2020)

A joke that my friend once told me comes to mind. A child, aged 5, will think that his father is some kind of a superman. He is strong and invincible. At 10, he is still looked up upon. In the teenage years, the relationship sours. By 20, son and father do not see eye-to-eye. Father tries to pave the path with his wisdom, but the son thinks his ways are passé. He soon refers to his father as 'your husband' when talking to his mother about him. He only communicates with his mother and does not engage in any form of conversation with his father. Things just happen in a ritualistic manner. Son gets married, has a child, slowly enjoys parenthood. He soon realises the intricacies of parenting. By 45, he is impressed by his father's ability to juggle work, family life and skill to educate his siblings with his meagre income. By 50 or 55, the son tries to make up for lost times. When the son is 60, the father has passed on, and the son starts praising his father again, putting him up on a pedestal. He would say, "my father was a great man. No one can do all the things he did." He once again becomes a Superman, an Ubermensch.

At the spring of youth, wanting to explore newer frontiers, learning new things, looking at things from a different, with the possession of new knowledge, we see our parents as fossilised dinosaurs. We think they are not in sync with reality and are not keeping up with the demands of the changing times. We abhor our parents, are embarrassed and vow never to be like them. After all, with the benefit of education and modern knowledge, we think we can do much better. At the end of the day, we realise how wrong we were!

We go through the mill, traversing the joys and aches that life has to offer and soon realise that at the end of the day, we become the very person(s) that we despise.

Anupama Banerjee, daughter of Shakuntala Devi.

If one were to think that this movie all about the achievements of Ms Shakuntala Devi, a simple girl from Karnataka, who later came to be known as the human-computer, an astrologist, a writer, an activist for the gay community and even as the politician who stood against Mrs Indira Gandhi, one will be disappointed. There are many facets of this interesting lady. The storytellers decide to concentrate on her dilemmas being a woman, a wife and a mother in a world that is not really ready for her outlook of the world.

The story is told from the point of view of her daughter Anupama Banerjee. Many, even those in India are not aware of Shakuntala Devi, the mathematics genius. She has the incredible ability to do swift mental calculations. With ease, she would rattle off roots, square roots of multiple orders in record times, faster than the early late 70s' calculators and computers. She also has the ability to tell the days in a calendar. Give her a particular date any year, and she could tell the day it was. She did all these without any formal education. Her father, a circus man, upon discovering her talent at a young age, decided to bring her around showcasing her abilities like a freakshow for money. He brought her to the UK, and she started her shows there, even in Imperial College. Her fame soon brought to all the four corners of the world. Her skills even find a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.

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Somebody to blame!

A few things involving youngsters hit the headlines. Their vocal expression of their opinion on a certain world leader (Amos Yee) and certain brand of politics in the country (Aisyah Tajuddin from BFM - it was not her opinion anyway but of the station ) got them lampooned with vile remarks. One of the caustic comments hurled by cyber-warriors was their bad upbringing. Their parents were accused of failing in their duties of moulding their offspring into socially acceptable beings. If only life was so easy.

Forget about what they said and why they said the things that they said. Is it that easy to mould one's child the way one's will? No matter what facilities are available or not available, the path of their future may take different routes. It is not easy to bend one's likes and dislikes to the tune of society. We can inflict regimental punishments and rules for non compliance but if the mind is not willing, it may just shut itself from reality and whirlpool itself into a fantasy world devoid of the pressures of real world. 

There is no one parenting formula that fits all. Like the proverb goes... to milk a dancing cow, dance! to milk a singing cow, sing! You may appear like a lunatic but the cow is milked, mission accomplished!

Pushing the boundaries of self expression

Transparent (TV miniseries, Season 1; 2014)

Living is easy with eyes closed. When you start analysing your existence in life, the purpose of life and start questioning every shred of existentialism, life becomes too complicated. It make living impossible for you and those around you.
When you feel discontented and yearn for the perpetual unattainable pleasures in life without appreciating the joy and magic that is around you, life can be a living hell. This, in essence, is the bane of modern living. We are unsure what we actually want in life. We are forever lamenting that life sucks and things could be better. We reach out beyond borders that are accepted as norm only to realise that that is not we were looking in the first place.
This new TV show just completed its first season, released for binge consumption by Amazon. The ten 30-minutes episodes narrate the saga of a dysfunctional family. The father, Mort/Maura, is a respected professor, who decide to come out in the open about his desire to cross dress, at the age of 60 plus. His struggle to live to his inner needs predates 10 years before the present and is told in flashback - how he used to secretly try out dresses and sneak out to a transgender camp. His wife, Shelly (Judith Light, we knew her as the main character of the 80s sitcom 'Who's the Boss'), left him after his confession for another man, Ed. This Ed is now demented and finally dies at the end of the series.

The season tells us how Mort/Maura slowly informs his kids (2 ladies and a man) of his cross dressing desires. This creates many error of comedy in this Jewish family. For a start, their Papa has become a Mama, so they address him as Mapa.

The kids themselves have the own sexuality problems. The elder daughter, a mother of two, decide to rekindle her lesbian relationship with her former college roommate. Another crisis that she has to handle is her issues with her husband and her desire to marry her partner.

The son, a confused chap in the music industry, jumps from bed to bed to partners unwilling to commit themselves. He finally finds love in a female Rabbi who had earlier vowed celibacy.
The younger daughter who is just pondering on her own true desires in life gets confessed to by her best friend who used to be her brother's girlfriend.
As the mother's boyfriend becomes more difficult to manage, the family comes together to decide whether they should pull the plug on him, by overdosing him. Luckily, they did not. He falls into the pool and drowns instead.

As you can see, this comedy is satire of sorts. On one hand, it highlights the plight of the transgender community and educate us that their transformation is not solely on fulfilling sexual gratifications. On the other, we wonder if he is creating further confusion as the transgenders start falling in love with the gender that they were biologically born to love! (Transgender male falling for females).

There is nothing sacred anymore - Boy & Boy; Boy & Girl; Girl & Girl; Boy & Girl & Girl; Girl & Boy & Boy.....

One theory that explains the increased incidence of gender identity crisis is the fact that oral contraceptive pills get metabolised in the kidneys and gets excreted into water cycle of nature and comes back to us in our drinking water, albeit in ultra low doses, screwing up the masculinity of mankind! Just a theory! Of course, people are more assertive these days on their likes and dislikes as well as demand their rights under the shield of the right to live as a human being.
Those afflicted with this aberrance insist that they are also God's creatures made in his mold. The opposers insist that The Divine is infallible and their conduct is self imposed and can be corrected.

Milliennial offspring of Helicopters

http://time.com/3154186/millennials-selfish-entitled-helicopter-parenting/

Millennials Are Selfish and Entitled, and Helicopter Parents Are to Blame

Nick Gillespie @nickgillespie Aug. 21, 2014

There are more overprotective moms and dads at a time when children are actually safer than ever

Peter Lourenco—Flickr RF/Getty Images

It’s natural to resent younger Americans — they’re younger!— but we’re on the verge of a new
generation gap that may make the nasty old fights between baby boomers and their
“Greatest Generation” parents look like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Seventy-one percent of American adults think of 18-to-29-year-olds — millennials, basically — as “selfish,” and 65% of us think of them as “entitled.” That’s according to the latest Reason-Rupe Poll, a quarterly survey of 1,000 representative adult Americans.

If millennials are self-absorbed little monsters who expect the world to come to them and for their parents to clean up their rooms well into their 20s, we’ve got no one to blame but
ourselves — especially the moms and dads among us.

Indeed, the same poll documents the ridiculous level of kid-coddling that has now become the new normal. More than two-thirds of us think there ought to be a law that kids as old as 9 should be supervised while playing at a public park, which helps explain (though not justify) the arrest of a South Carolina mother who let her phone-enabled daughter play in a busy park while she worked at a nearby McDonald’s. We think on average that kids should be 10 years old before they “are allowed to play in the front yard unsupervised.” Unless you live on a traffic island or a war zone, that’s just nuts.

It gets worse: We think that our precious bundles of joy should be 12 before they can wait alone in a car for five minutes on a cool day or walk to school without an adult, and that they should be 13 before they can be trusted to stay home alone. You’d think that kids raised on Baby Einstein DVDs should be a little more advanced than that.

Curiously, this sort of ridiculous hyperprotectiveness is playing out against a backdrop in which children are safer than ever. Students reporting bullying is one-third of what it was 20 years ago, and according to a study in JAMA Pediatrics, the past decade has seen massive declines in exposure to violence for kids. Out of 50 trends studied, summarize the authors, “there were 27 significant declines and no significant increases between 2003 and 2011. Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual victimization. There were also significant declines in the perpetration of violence and property crime.”

There are surely many causes for the mainstreaming of helicopter parenting. Kids cost a hell of a lot to raise. The U.S. Department of Agriculture figures a child born in 2013 will set back middle-income parents about $245,000 up to age 17 (and that’s before college bills kick in).

We’re having fewer children, so we’re putting fewer eggs in a smaller basket, so to speak. According to the Reason-Rupe poll, only 27% of adults thought the media were overestimating threats to the day-to-day safety of children, suggesting that 73% of us are suckers for sensationalistic news coverage that distorts reality (62% of us erroneously think that today’s youth face greater dangers than previous generations). More kids are in institutional settings — whether preschool or school itself — at earlier ages, so maybe parents just assume someone will always be on call.

But whatever the reasons for our insistence that we childproof the world around us, this way madness lies. From King Lear to Mildred Pierce, classic literature (and basic common sense) suggests that coddling kids is no way to raise thriving, much less grateful, offspring. Indeed, quite the opposite. And with 58% of millennials callingthemselves “entitled” and more than 70% saying they are “selfish,” older Americans may soon be learning that lesson the hard way.

No right, no wrong!

Don't know why, this week, two of the people just went on rattling about the problems they were having with their kids. Not to solve their problems but to ventilate, hoping to hear that they had not done it all wrong but they did all right. To hear that they did what was right in that particular frame of time, in that specific situation, with the resources that they had. It looks like everyone is in the same boat, expectations on the duties performed. The receiving party, however, feels that it is their birthright to be given on the platter. Through thick and thin, the providers provided, feeling that the responsibility was theirs to shoulder (ain't too heavy 'cause it is their flesh and bone).

What they expect in return is gratitude and respect that they had given their elders. But then, times change and values change. Gratitude in the medieval times is paid back with life, in the spanking new technology-driven 21st-century world, it would be a 'like' on your Facebook!

What the provider really want is for the recipient to be able to weather the storm which may strike at any time in their unpredictable lives and also to be a steadfast rock for future dependents! That's all.

The best graduation speech!

Young King Solomon

Now it is that time of the year where a certain group of teenagers aged 17 will be mollycoddled with their favourite cooking and given lots of space in the house. They would be kings, ensuring peace and quiet in the house and metaphorically could get away with murder. Refrigerators would be packed with chocolate and packet drinks. And the queue of parents waiting at the school gate to pass the hot burger or brain soup is a sight to to behold. All these in the hope that the parents would not be blamed for their failures in examinations. As more and more Malaysian parents become rodents in the race for academic excellence, character building, extra-academic performance and development of the non-dominant side of the brain takes a back burner! But that is another story...
I remember back in November 1994, in the wintery chilly winds of Edinburgh, I was walking aimlessly past the museum when I bumped into, of all person,  my euphoric varsity mate (BBP) whom I had not laid eyes on over 6 years just manifested in front of me. Euphoric, because he had cleared his professional examinations. Talk about the world being small! Edinburgh is for Malaysian aspirants to specialize in the field of medicine, like Paris was for writers in 1920s - great place to meet the same minded. In another instance, a guy (SS) jumped right in front of me from a moving bus and he happened to be working in the same place back in Malaysia!

Rush with goodies!

RCP, Edinburgh

So BBP became my soul mate for the couple of  days before his departure home. I had the privilege of attending his convocation in the ceremonial-rich occasion, full regatta with bag pipes and tartans in the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. The then President of the College made a memorable speech which I thought was very apt and hit the nail right where it should. He said something to the effect of that the scrolls received by the candidates were not just success of the recipients alone. It is also the result of all the sacrifice of the loved one (wives, parents, children) in doing little things like making that thick  black coffee and other trivial things. How true!