From the Mouths of Babes

Pawan Verma

There are many advantages of having children. They are a great help in old age and they help you attain it faster as well. Quite often, they help you learn the virtues of patience. They also help you realise that obedience to children is the best insurance against developing insanity.

Any experienced parent will tell you that there are two difficult periods during the parenthood. First, when your children start asking questions that have answers. The second period comes even earlier: when your children start asking questions that have no answers. In the search for an answer, you certainly can’t draw from your realm of reasoning.

As a parent, I realised this fact of life when our second child was born. It was one of those intimate family moments when myself, my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Shweta, and my wife Neelima with new born baby in her lap, were sitting together choosing a name for the newborn.

As we were rejecting one name after the other, my wife came out with the name ’Harsh’. But before I could endorse the suggestion I discovered the horror and disbeliefs in my daughter’s face. As a sweet little girl who had started going to school and had just added up a few English words to her vocabulary, she instantly protested, “Dad, shall we call him horse?” No amount of reasoning would convince her, for the simple reason that this new word was just not there in her dictionary.

Years later, when the infant baby had grown into a cute little three-year-old, my reasoning was put to test once again. One evening, as the entire family was sitting around the study table, this young man suddenly startled up.

As I lifted my eyes from the book, I saw a twinkle in his eyes. Excited, he announced in the ‘Eureka’ style, “You know, I can switch off the lights sitting right here.” Amused I asked him to show me how. He closed his eyes and said, “See, now the lights are off.” I told him that I could also do the same, and closing my eyes I announced that the lights were off. But the young man, with his eyes wide open protested vehemently that they were not.

As he was quick to take the confirmation of those around him, I only realised what a fool I was making of myself in the eyes of my son. Once again, no amount of reasoning could convince him that by closing his eyes he could not put off the lights.

These small incidents in life have given me a lot of belated wisdom to face the world. For, as a public sector executive, when I am faced with a similar kind of logic and perception coming from my unions, I do not get agitated. I do not get perplexed when they open the windows and yet do not see the light outside. Their demands on the management quite often remind me of the story of the old man who was reading a newspaper in a park. A young man came up and sat near him for a while.

Moments later, the young man asked him if he could lend his specs for a while. After the old man had parted with the specs, the young man came out with another request, “I don’t think without the specs the newspaper has any utility for you. Can you give it to me?”