There are kids, and then there are parents. Parents, now, they are a category of dumb people. Seriously. I have two of them. So I know.. No! Actually, I had 6, considering "grand"parents. That is of course before my maternal grandmom decided to leave for her heavenly abode.
I was traveling on a train. And as you know, on a train, there are a lot of people who sell a lot of things. Many of the things the people go about selling are colorful shiny things that catch the attention of cranky little kids.Which in turn gives the kids an opportunity to pester their parents with their needs, wants and demands, to which, the parents comply in order to avoid any embarrassment in pubic caused by their kid's rampant and uncalled for behavior.
Hence came along a chap selling pineapple juice, also announcing to the world of his world of his arrival. The kid sitting next to me obviously saw the arrival of the juice seller. The thing with kids is that they want everything they see and hear about. The next thing I heard was "Mumma, I want juice!"
Yeah! Needless to say that it was the kid sitting next to me. The poor mother helplessly complied.
The kid happily sucked on the juice with a straw. Happyz Endingz!
And this incident is not that the post is about. A while before the juice vendor came blowing his own horn, the kid was busy at drawing something. She had a big color set, replete with crayons, color pencils, and all the paraphernalia that da Vinci needed to complete all his works. Basically, the kid was at her thing, completely immersed in what ever it was that she was drawing. After she was done, she brought along the piece of paper with her drawing to her mother and showed it to her. From the mother's reaction, I understood that the kid had drawn her mother's face.Finally, I got a glimpse of the drawing. It was supposed to be the mother's face from some contorted angle. Or it was the mother's face, purely for representative purposes, like how in Indian movies, if you see the goons being thrown around, it means that the hero is beating the living daylights out of the villains. Never mind the bad example I made use of.
Any way, I saw the drawing, and one thing I can say for sure is that the kid shouldn't pursue a career that has anything to do with drawing. For she will die penniless.
Had I been the mother of that kid, and had the kid come to me to show her version of my face, the events following I seeing my so called "Portrait" would look like....
But that same obnoxious little drawing made the mother smile like there was nothing more that could have made her happier in the world. And I thought to myself..... "What a dumb female!"
The mother kept smiling for a very long time after she saw the drawing. I must say, the kid was smart. Not that she used the drawing to manipulate her mother in any devious manner. Just that the kid's energy was absolutely BONKERS! Jumping, singing, talking to someone, sometimes talking to no one. I consider myself a high energy individual, specially given that very often, people nowadays behave no better than corpses, as far as their energy levels are concerned. And here was a kid in all her vibrancy. How I wish we could all be, and more so, remain child-like for the time we have on this planet. I know a few people whom I've seen when their energy levels were all spiked up, but then that's another topic for discussion.
Okay! Back to parents! These folks light up like Christmas trees when they get to know that their progenies are so much so even thinking about them. Then they think to themselves "Oh! That's my kid!! I'm so proud of him/her!". They also go about thinking so out loud. Sometimes, a tad too loud. Goodness knows what makes them so proud of us, their kids. It must be because they are still not out of the shock that sexual intercourse produces geniuses! I obviously don't know the actual reason to why parents feel proud of their children, and why they invest so much of their time, energy and money nourishing, worrying and fretting over their children. Or maybe I do have some clue as to what makes us, children of our parents, a major cause of worry for our parents.
I have a simple argument for this, a modified version of Richard Dawkins's reasoning in his book The Selfish Gene. It's like this. Our parent survive through us. Meaning, after all our evolution so far, we have attained a particular lifespan of typically 5-8 decades. And our primary purpose is to ensure the safest possible passing of our genes into the future generations, or at least make way for passing our genes forward. And that is through having kids. So the least the parents can do to ensure the survival and passing forward of their genes is to take care of the kids they happened to produce. Specially if the kids are weaklings like those of humans.
Of course, taking care of human kids involves a lot of diaper cleaning, lot of potty training, lot of talking nonsense languages to a toddler, who by itself has no clue of what this gigantic creature is talking and smiling about. Bringing kids up also has a ton of expenditure, more tonnes of emotional and financial investment, lots of scolding, sometimes even spanking, and another ton of things I have no clue about. I still think of myself as a toddler wondering why the big mamma and big pappa are smiling so much after picking me up. And although I don't shit in my pants(diaper) when dad starts shouting anymore, somewhere in the back of my soft head, I still think that dad is the strongest man there can be. I could be wrong. But believing so has kept me in good stead so far.
There's a line in the movie Interstellar that almost brought me to tears.
Cooper(The lead protagonist says to his daughter): "After you kids came along, your mom, she said something to me I never quite understood.
She said: Now, we’re just here……to be the memories for our kids."
What brought me to tears was my interpretation of the lines I just quoted from the movie, which is that after our parents have given birth to us, and decide to not produce any more children, their existence is of no consequence. Basically, after we are born, it doesn't really matter if our parents live or die. Yes, of course our emotions(which seem like common sense to us) tell us that this thought is probably the most absurd of things that can come up in our minds. But sadly, from an evolutionary perspective, this realization is irrefutably true.
Now I wish to have never had this realization.
I was traveling on a train. And as you know, on a train, there are a lot of people who sell a lot of things. Many of the things the people go about selling are colorful shiny things that catch the attention of cranky little kids.Which in turn gives the kids an opportunity to pester their parents with their needs, wants and demands, to which, the parents comply in order to avoid any embarrassment in pubic caused by their kid's rampant and uncalled for behavior.
Hence came along a chap selling pineapple juice, also announcing to the world of his world of his arrival. The kid sitting next to me obviously saw the arrival of the juice seller. The thing with kids is that they want everything they see and hear about. The next thing I heard was "Mumma, I want juice!"
Yeah! Needless to say that it was the kid sitting next to me. The poor mother helplessly complied.
The kid happily sucked on the juice with a straw. Happyz Endingz!
And this incident is not that the post is about. A while before the juice vendor came blowing his own horn, the kid was busy at drawing something. She had a big color set, replete with crayons, color pencils, and all the paraphernalia that da Vinci needed to complete all his works. Basically, the kid was at her thing, completely immersed in what ever it was that she was drawing. After she was done, she brought along the piece of paper with her drawing to her mother and showed it to her. From the mother's reaction, I understood that the kid had drawn her mother's face.Finally, I got a glimpse of the drawing. It was supposed to be the mother's face from some contorted angle. Or it was the mother's face, purely for representative purposes, like how in Indian movies, if you see the goons being thrown around, it means that the hero is beating the living daylights out of the villains. Never mind the bad example I made use of.
Any way, I saw the drawing, and one thing I can say for sure is that the kid shouldn't pursue a career that has anything to do with drawing. For she will die penniless.
Had I been the mother of that kid, and had the kid come to me to show her version of my face, the events following I seeing my so called "Portrait" would look like....
 |
| I look like that, you say?? Stupid kid!! |
The mother kept smiling for a very long time after she saw the drawing. I must say, the kid was smart. Not that she used the drawing to manipulate her mother in any devious manner. Just that the kid's energy was absolutely BONKERS! Jumping, singing, talking to someone, sometimes talking to no one. I consider myself a high energy individual, specially given that very often, people nowadays behave no better than corpses, as far as their energy levels are concerned. And here was a kid in all her vibrancy. How I wish we could all be, and more so, remain child-like for the time we have on this planet. I know a few people whom I've seen when their energy levels were all spiked up, but then that's another topic for discussion.
Okay! Back to parents! These folks light up like Christmas trees when they get to know that their progenies are so much so even thinking about them. Then they think to themselves "Oh! That's my kid!! I'm so proud of him/her!". They also go about thinking so out loud. Sometimes, a tad too loud. Goodness knows what makes them so proud of us, their kids. It must be because they are still not out of the shock that sexual intercourse produces geniuses! I obviously don't know the actual reason to why parents feel proud of their children, and why they invest so much of their time, energy and money nourishing, worrying and fretting over their children. Or maybe I do have some clue as to what makes us, children of our parents, a major cause of worry for our parents.
I have a simple argument for this, a modified version of Richard Dawkins's reasoning in his book The Selfish Gene. It's like this. Our parent survive through us. Meaning, after all our evolution so far, we have attained a particular lifespan of typically 5-8 decades. And our primary purpose is to ensure the safest possible passing of our genes into the future generations, or at least make way for passing our genes forward. And that is through having kids. So the least the parents can do to ensure the survival and passing forward of their genes is to take care of the kids they happened to produce. Specially if the kids are weaklings like those of humans.
Of course, taking care of human kids involves a lot of diaper cleaning, lot of potty training, lot of talking nonsense languages to a toddler, who by itself has no clue of what this gigantic creature is talking and smiling about. Bringing kids up also has a ton of expenditure, more tonnes of emotional and financial investment, lots of scolding, sometimes even spanking, and another ton of things I have no clue about. I still think of myself as a toddler wondering why the big mamma and big pappa are smiling so much after picking me up. And although I don't shit in my pants(diaper) when dad starts shouting anymore, somewhere in the back of my soft head, I still think that dad is the strongest man there can be. I could be wrong. But believing so has kept me in good stead so far.
There's a line in the movie Interstellar that almost brought me to tears.
Cooper(The lead protagonist says to his daughter): "After you kids came along, your mom, she said something to me I never quite understood.
She said: Now, we’re just here……to be the memories for our kids."
What brought me to tears was my interpretation of the lines I just quoted from the movie, which is that after our parents have given birth to us, and decide to not produce any more children, their existence is of no consequence. Basically, after we are born, it doesn't really matter if our parents live or die. Yes, of course our emotions(which seem like common sense to us) tell us that this thought is probably the most absurd of things that can come up in our minds. But sadly, from an evolutionary perspective, this realization is irrefutably true.
Now I wish to have never had this realization.
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