abu & rabad

I like to think of myself as a liberal person. But, some things just don’t feel right. Like, having your 6-8 year old girls choreograph a dance to ‘sheila ki jawani’ and the adults will later watch the performance. Even if it is a private party for a few close families. Even if everyone’s daughter [...Read More...]

The following is a real conversation I had yesterday with Mr. X (who will remain nameless to save him public embarrassment ) over Facebook chat and SMS. I was sitting at my computer, and suddenly, without any warning or context, the following facebook chat message from Mr. X to me popped up: why dont u [...Read More...]

A couple of days, I saw a random email forward with humorous answers from kids to a bunch of questions. I decided to find out what kinds of answers would Abu and Rabad give to the same questions. So here goes. Why did God make mothers? [Abu]: Because if mother didn’t exist, you didn’t exist [...Read More...]

These days, whenever Abu is supposed to be doing a time-limited activity, I often use the Online-Stopwatch.com. Thus, instead of simply saying “You can play the computer for half an hour,” I tell him to start the timer for 30 minutes, and tell him that he’s supposed to stop playing when the timer goes off. [...Read More...]

rabad suddenly remarked – i wish sachin was our friend. (yes, yes – THE sachin, why would I write a post if it was anyone else. duh.) me – huh? why? (wondering if she noticed my schoolgirl crush. or if she had one for him) rabad – then he’d ask “when is your birthday?” and [...Read More...]

Rabad dislikes reading. More accurately, I think she would love to be able to read a lot, but is currently not able to, and hence finds reading frustrating. She loves me reading to her, but does not want to read herself. Mainly because she hasn’t yet mastered the basics of sight reading, and hence reading [...Read More...]

So I was explaining the whole Anna Hazare situation to Abu & Rabad, and realized that there was a lot of explaining to do. “You know, sometimes, our leaders take money from bad people and do bad things for them. That is called corruption. Is that a good thing?” “No” “What should happen to leaders [...Read More...]

Recently I received a “email forward” which listed the various ways in which the world has changed since I was a kid. Stuff like when I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the [...Read More...]

Abu and Rabad’s cousin Pr___ (who is 18) was with us this weekend. She is starting college this week, and she will be staying in a hostel. Abu/Rabad’s friend Sw___ (who is 9 years old) was also with us on Sunday morning, and when we were all together, I asked the kids this question: “Pr___ [...Read More...]

As I walked into our apartment complex yesterday evening, Rabad was playing in the parking lot with a bunch of her friends. Upon seeing me she gave a whoop of joy, and came hugged me. Then, she got serious. “You know, Pappa, the earth is going to finish.” My first instinct was to say What [...Read More...]