Happy Father’s Day

How do traditions get made? What should they signify?

Circa 1996, one day my mother was asked to stay back in school at pick up time since the teachers wanted to have a word about me with her. It was sort of an intervention, one where they expressed their frustration at how, for the life of me, they could not get me to pay attention to anything at school. 

The problem was that I would steal practically any moment of my waking day to read. Read my kids abridged version of classic novels that is. I read them hidden under the desk for every period. I read them in recess. I sometimes took them to the bathroom and “fell of the cliff hangers” in storyline speak. I tried to smuggle them into every other activity mandated by school. Ridiculing me in class didn’t seem to have any effect whatsoever. Now we were being given an ultimatum. I was borderline “failing” math, sport and a couple of other classes. I wasn’t naughty or rude. Just obsessively into my novels. As a weird kid with an unheard of issue, I wasn’t really working out for them. (Thanks to a no-corporal-punishment policy at school, my OCD reading habit survived the formal education system).

I could feel the anxiety in the air. My father came home later in the evening and was informed about the ultimatum. Here’s what happened next. He immediately took me to a bookshop. I found him telling the shopkeeper: “Give me every title in this series that you can find in your store and warehouse right now. I want to buy them all for my little girl”. And he bought me this whole series.

Of course I had no way of articulating this then, but now I do. This small act was his way of saying, your curiosity and imagination are important. And safe with us. We went home and quite like that scene from TKMB where Scout & Atticus strike a deal, we struck a deal, to “deal” with school. I could read as much as I wanted to but I needed to pass my exams.

I continued reading, barely passing math all the way to sixth grade. People would come and tell him, a math genius like you, looks like the genes have skipped your daughter. Some sexist douches added, of course your son will probably continue the mantle, daughters don’t inherit such things anyway (wow). (And, yes those male “adults” are still alive and probably done raining on many other young girls’ dreams by now). None of this bothered him and he taught me not to get bothered by it either. Was I bad at Math? Of course not (my whole adult life is proof of that). It just hadn’t struck my fancy yet. I was very happy in my world of characters. One where I had multiple friends, stories and a rich canvas of emotions and events to think about.

My father was/is by all definitions, means and purposes, an academic genius. Just to give you an idea, he had an IIT JEE All India Rank countable on one’s fingers. An achievement many people would kill/die for even today. One of the first graduates,(THE) first engineer in our community and with no one truly having any context on the meaning of that achievement, an accurate equivalent would be someone just showing up at the olympics and bagging the gold medal. Can you imagine such a person understanding that grades are unimportant? To have the open mindedness and intelligence to realize that there are many ways to win in life. (Some people remain slaves to the “game”, some others transcend them). In the intellectual poverty of Indian society’s elite, my brother and I grew up in the protection of my father’s towering open mindedness.

So how did we find ourselves in this predicament of a school ultimatum? You see, when I was about to arrive, my dad was trying to get a company off the ground during an era when entrepreneurship wasn’t understood or respected. As he saw it, the path ahead was going to be strewn with unpleasant choices between time with the family or the business. He did the next best thing he could think of. He decided to teach me how to read ASAP, himself. To everyone’s pleasant surprise he found an obliviously happy student. As far back as my memory goes, my favorite activity was to share a new word with my father, like a hunted treasure. I thought my dad was a hero because he knew the meaning of all the words in the world.

These books, their simple words and pictures would seem just that to a bystander, simple. But I still remember those emotions intensely. Like feeling Phileas Fogg’s urgency in trying to go around the world in 80 days, the betrayal of Monte de Cristo, the frustrations of Jo March. Seeing the world through the Siberian husky Fang’s eyes who survives in wild Yukon (years later when I left home for boarding school at 12, I had a template for separation in my mind). Their emotions, pain, anger and triumphs overwhelmed the small tiny human that I was and those emotions became mine.

How do traditions get made? What should they signify?

I hope to start this tradition in my family and I hope that it remains one for my children. One where they feel that their curiosity and imagination are important and worth safekeeping.

These books are ~20 years old now. Their frail pages and homely smell takes me right back to some precious, innocent, exciting moments of my childhood. One where I was traveling the world without leaving my seat. These books signify safety to me, and I hope that they will come to mean the same to them. A mother’s hope, passed on from their grandfather to them.

It is true what they say: “Behind every independent woman, is a father, who trusted her and not society”.

Happy Father’s Day Mahaveer Meghawat!

Epilogue

Why is this post public?

Because maybe you could get into these hairy, murky, gray areas with me, the facts that:

My father’s illustrious resume, one that goes from being an academic to an entrepreneur has garnered accolades with a constant and regular cadence throughout all our lives. However none of that adulation captures what an amazing father he is. As if that’s somehow less relevant or important to a person’s worth.

Having recently become a mom and finding myself on the receiving end of almost all social constructs, I find the structural omission of parental labor from formal “economic” value abhorrent. The psychological tension caused by this deliberate “by-design” setup that divvies up a person into 2 halves who are often at odds with each other, e.g. the “productive” persona you must maintain on a platform like LinkedIn and the nurturing parent you must be in real life.

Or the irony that as a society we pay those who make computers smarter, more, than those who nurture/make humans smarter. (And you don’t have to take my words with a grain of salt because I currently occupy both those roles but am “valued economically” for only one of them).

This small fathers day post is to set the record straight on all of these hairy, murky, gray areas, atleast a little bit.