Category: fatherhood

Algo trading and ice cream

I refuse to share ice cream with my daughter, just like I used to refuse to share peanuts with my father. This refusal to share in both cases primarily has to do with the differential speed of consumption.

With my father and peanuts, it was a matter of ability – as someone who had grown up on a peanut farm (and thus he was a fan of Jimmy Carter), he was an expert at shelling peanuts. The Bangalore-born me was much less expert, and so before I knew it he would have finished the lot of it.

With my daughter and ice cream, it is a matter of willingness – she likes to finish it quickly, in big spoons. I like to savour it over a long time – at home,  I use a rather small spoon and eat it slowly. Nowadays I’ve been trying to cut down sugars and so when I eat them I try to get the maximum benefit out of them and thus eat slowly. However, even as a child I would eat my desserts slowly, trying to “extract maximum benefits”.

So last night we were having ice cream (individual small tubs of course). Daughter finished hers quickly and came to me, to see that my tub was still half full (and I was blogging as I was eating it).

“Appa, why do you like to turn your ice cream into milkshake?”, she asked.

“I don’t”, I said, “I just try to get the maximum value out of it, and thus I eat it slowly”.

“But then if you take too long to eat, then it turns into milkshake which is much less enjoyable than ice cream”, she countered. She had a valid point.

And then I realised this is exactly the problem I worked on during my stint as an investment banking quant in 2009-11. I was working on algo trading, specifically execution of large block deals.

The tradeoff there was that if you traded too quickly, you would end up moving the market and thus trading at an unfavourable price. On the other hand, if you traded too slowly, the natural volatility of the stock would mean that the market might move against you. And so you had to balance the two and trade.

I won’t go into the details on how we solved it (my erstwhile bank might not like it), but it suffices to say here that it is similar to eating ice cream.

If you eat too quickly, you run the risk of not getting sufficient “benefit” out of the ice cream at hand. If you eat too slowly, then there is the risk that the ice cream itself will melt and thus be less enjoyable for you.

I tried explaining this analogy to my daughter last night, but she didn’t get it. I guess she is too young to understand risk, volatility, market impact and the like.

And so I’m inflicting this on you!

Sierpinski Triangles

On Saturday morning, my daughter had made some nice art with sketch pen on an A4 paper. It was rather “geometric” consisting of repeating patterns across the page. My wife took one look at it and said, “do you know that you can make such art with computers also? Your father has made some”.

Some drawings I had made using code, back in 2016

“Reallly?”, piped the daughter. I had been intending for a while to start teaching her to code (she is six), and figured this was the perfect trigger, and said I will teach her.

A quick search revealed that there is an “ACS Logo” for Mac (Logo was the first “programming language” I had learnt, when I was nine). I quickly downloaded it on her computer (my wife’s old Macbook Air) and figured I remembered most of the commands.

And then I started typing, and showed her what they had showed me back in  a “computer class” behind my house in 1992 – FD for “forward”. RT for right turn. HT for hide turtle. Etc. Etc.

Soon she was engrossed in it. Thankfully she has learnt angles in her school, though it took her some trial and error to figure out how much to turn by for different shapes (later I was thinking this can also serve as a good “angles revision” for her during her ongoing summer holidays).

With my wife having reminded me that I could produce images through code, I realised that as my daughter was engrossed in her “coding”, I should do some “coding art” on my own. All she needed was some occasional input, and for me to sit right next to her.

Last Monday I had got a bit of a scare – at work, I needed to generate randomly distributed points in a regular hexagon. A lookup online told me that I could just get a larger number of randomly distributed points in a bounding rectangle, and then only pick points within the hexagon. And then take a random sample of those.

This had meant that I needed to write equations for whether a point lay inside a hexagon. And I realised I’d forgotten ALL my coordinate geometry. It took me over half an hour to get the equation for the sides of the hexagon right – I’m clearly rusty.

And on Saturday, as I sat down to make some “computer art”, I decided I’ll make some fractals. Why don’t I make some Sierpinski Triangles, I thought. I started breaking down what code I needed to write.

First, given an equilateral triangle, I had to return three similar equilateral triangles, each of half the side length of the original triangles.

Then, given the centroid of an equilateral triangle and the length of each side, I had to return the vertices.

Once these two functions had been written, I could just chain them (after running the first one recursively) and then had to just plot to get the Sierpinski triangle.

And then I had my second scare of the week – not only had I forgotten my coordinate geometry – I had forgotten my trigonometry as well. Again I messed up a few times, but the good thing about programming with a computer is that i could do trial and error. Soon I had it right, and started producing Sierpinski triangles.

Then, there was another problem – my code was really inefficient. If I went beyond depth 4 or 5, the figures would take inordinately long to render. Since I was coding in R, I set about vectorising all my code. In R you don’t write loops if you can help it – instead, you apply functions on entire vectors. This again took some time, and then I had the triangles ready. I proudly showed them off to my daughter.

“Appa, why is it that as you increase the number it becomes greyer”, she asked . I explained how with each step, you were taking away more of the filled areas from the triangles. Then I figured this wasn’t that good-looking – maybe I should colour it.

And so I wrote code to colour the triangles. Basically, I started recursively colouring them – the top third green, left third red and right third blue (starting with a red base). This is what I ended up producing:

And this is what my daughter produced at the same time, using Logo:

I forgot to “HT” before taking the screenshot. This is a “lollipop” 

Lifting and arithmetic

At a party we hosted recently, we ended up talking a lot about lifting heavy weights in the gym. In the middle of the conversation, my wife wondered loudly as to why “so many intelligent people are into weightlifting nowadays”. A few theories got postulated in the following few minutes but I’m not going to talk about that here.

Anecdotally, this is true. The two people I hold responsible for getting me lift heavy weights are both people I consider rather intelligent. I discuss weights and lifting with quite a few other friends as well. Nassim Taleb, for a long time, kept tweeting about deadlifts, though now he has dialled back on strength training.

In 2012 or 2013 I had written about how hard it was to maintain a good diet and exercise regime. While I had stopped being really fat in 2009, my weight had started creeping up again and my triglyceride numbers hadn’t been good. I had found it hard to stick to a diet, and found the gym rather boring.

In response, one old friend (one of the intelligent people I mentioned above) sent me Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength (and a few other articles on cutting carbs, and high-fat diets). Starting Strength, in a way, brought back geekery into the gym, which had until then been taken over by “gym bros” doing bicep curls and staring into mirrors.

It’s been a long time since I read it, but it’s fascinating – I remember reading it and thinking it reminded me of IIT-JEE physics. He draws free body diagrams to explain why you should maintain a straight bar path. He talks about “moment arms” to explain why the bar should be over your mid-foot while deadlifting (ok this book we did discuss at the party in response to my wife’s question).

However, two incidents that happened last week gave me an idea on why “intelligent people” are drawn to lifting heavy barbells. It’s about challenging yourself to the right extent.

The gym that I go to (a rather kickass gym) has regular classes that most members attend. These classes focus on functional fitness (among other things, everyone is made to squat and press and deadlift), but I’ve for long found that these classes bore me so I just do my own thing (squats, press / bench and deadlift, on most days). Occasionally, though, like last Friday, I decide to “do the class”. And on these occasions, I remember why I don’t like the class.

The problem with the gym class is that I get bored. Most of the time, the exercises you are doing are of the sort where you lift well below capacity on each lift, but you do a lot of lifts. They train you not just for strength but also for endurance and metabolic conditioning. The problem with that for me is that because every single repetition is not challenging, I get bored. “Why do i need to do so much”, I think. Last Friday I exited the class midway, bored.

My daughter is having school holidays, and one of the things we have figured is that while she has grasped all her maths concepts rather soundly (the montessori system does a good job of that), she has completely failed to mug her tables. If I ask her what is “7 times 4” (for example), she takes half a minute, adds  7 four times and tells me.

Last Monday, I printed out (using Excel) all combinations of single digit multiplications and told her she “better mug it by Friday”. She completely refused to do it. There was no headway in her “learning”. I resorted to occasionally asking her simple arithmetic questions and making her answer immediately. While waiting to cross the road while on a walk, “what is six times eight?”. While waiting for the baker to give us bread “you gave him ?100 and the bread costs ?40. How much change should he give you?”. And so on.

She would occasionally answer but again her boredom was inherent. The concept learning had been challenging for her and she had learnt it. But this “repetitive practice” was boring and she would refuse to do it.

Then, last Friday, I decided to take it up a notch. I suddenly asked “what is four and a half times eight?” (she’s done fractions in school). This was a gamechanger.

Suddenly, by dialling up the challenge, she got interested, and with some prodding gave me the correct answer. An hour earlier, she had struggled for a minute to tell me what 8 times 7 is. However, when I asked her “what is eight times seven and a half?” she responded in a few seconds, “eight times seven is fifty six..” (and then proceeded to complete the solution).

Having exited my gym class midway just that morning, I was now able to make sense of everything. Practicing simple arithmetic for her is like light weight lifting for me. “Each rep” is not challenging in either case, and so we get bored and don’t want to do it. Dial up the challenge a little bit, such as bringing in fractions or making the weights very heavy, and now every rep is a challenge. The whole thing becomes more fun.

And if you are of the type that easily gets bored and wants to do things where each unit is challenging, barbell training is an obvious way to exercise. and “intelligent” people are more likely to get bored of routine stuff. And so they are taking to lifting heavy weights.

I guess my wife has her answer now.

 

Letters To My Berry #60

Yes. I’m messing with mumma’s numbers. The last one she wrote was #33. However, since we used to write one every month when you were little, I decided this should be called #60. 12 times 5. There are 12 months in a year.

On that note, you know how to multiply now. And divide. And add and subtract, of course. You’ve also learnt fractions, and prime numbers and square numbers, most of them from school but some of them because I try my experiments on you.

And you are an amazing and eager learner.

One of your and my high points in the last 3-4 months has been the quizzes. In March or April, mumma started taking you for this “Qshala family quiz”. While you would know the answers to most questions there, you would never get a chance to speak out the answers. And that would make you unhappy, and you would cry.

So we decided you needed your own quiz. I’ve had a blast setting them. At the young age of not-yet-5, you have been introduced to the concepts of “list it” and “stage 2”. Don’t be surprised to see a long visual connect before you are 6.

The kind of stuff you are interested in is incredible. I had randomly found a nice periodic table map on Amazon, and got it for you. And it turned out that you not only know all the Noble Gases, but you know it all in ORDER. One day you and I were doing a Sporcle Periodic Table quiz together, and you surprised me with how much you knew.

You are also amazing at recognising countries from their football shirts (basically mapping to their flags), from their shapes, flags and all such. Some day I was watching some random football video, and you recognised the flag of North Macedonia! Mumma was flabbergasted.

The time since the last time we wrote a letter to you coincided with another big wave of covid and lockdown. You had been happily going to offline school, even if only on two days a week, when we wrote the last letter, but then everything shut again.

However, the difference between this lockdown and the previous ones was that by now you had learnt to read. And you devoured books. During a family zoom call during this period, someone asked you what kind of books you like, and you replied saying “I only read non fiction”.

Barbie sent you a book on the human body and you demolished it in one evening. You surprise us once in every few days based on what you know. And when you speak, or tweet from my account, you can get really profound.

Like today, mumma told me “get a life”, and you asked what “life” means. The other day, you tweeted this:

https://mobile.twitter.com/karthiks/status/1428970068474404864

In terms of profundity, though, I was (positively) amazed at one of your actions when we visited your cousins Mahika and Arhita last month. We had taken along a cake, and all you children cut it. The cake had a piece of chocolate on it, and two other kids were negotiating on who gets that, and what toppings the other child would get. And as they were talking animatedly you calmly put out your hand, picked up the chocolate and ate it off!

You are not afraid at all to ask questions. Now that school has started again, you love going there, and have started taking care of the younger children in school and showing them works.

Oh, and in the last month and a half, your reading pattern has changed considerably. It started with a visit to this wonderful bookshop called “Lightroom” in Cooke Town. I, as usual, bought you a whole bunch of non fiction books. Mumma bought you a whole bunch of fiction books.

And suddenly, after that, you only read fiction. You still don’t read “big people books” with lots of text and no pictures (so no Tinkle yet), but love your little stories. You would read them so often that the other day mumma decided to put away all your fiction books in a shelf, so that you can get back to reading non fiction.

Five year old paaps! You are a big girl now. And literally. You have had a growth spurt in the last month or so, and are now so heavy that mumma can’t carry you.

On most days you sleep by yourself in your room. In fact, now you’ve gotten a much bigger room for yourself as we swapped what was your room with the study. You have SO many things that you need such a big room. You sleep there all by yourself, surrounded by your toys. You wake up in the morning and make your own bed, if you haven’t sneaked across the house to our room in the middle of the night that is.

You know – I’m actually feeling conscious writing this because I know that you are fully capable of reading this now. There might be the odd word here or there that you may not know – but will make sure you ask – but reading this should be a breeze now. And os I’m conscious that I shouldn’t make this too long – else you might put NED to read this.

And since it’s been so long since we wrote this, there is still so much more to say. So I’ll just do this in bullet points:

  • You’ve recently gone back to a “appa do like this” phase. You make weird shapes with your hands and want me to copy them exactly
  • Mamma has gotten you hooked to Jurassic Park, and similar “dinosaur movies”. And you love watching and re-watching them. Of course, you get scared as well! That is just part of the game
  • You have restarted voice training classes with Mads.
  • You can brush your hair and tie it up into a “monkey jutta” all by yourself
  • You are self sufficient enough now that we don’t have to supervise your online school. You open my laptop, find the calendar notification and join the Zooom meeting
  • Thanks to the second wave, there has been no travel, unfortunately in the last 6 months. Hopefully we can correct this soon. Then again – you got your passport renewed in this time
  • You still ask for permission when you want to see cartoons. That said, you don’t see much of cartoons nowadays. Books and Khan Academy are more interesting to you

OK I guess it’s really time to stop now! Happy birthday, sweetheart! Have a great year ahead.

 

Friends

This is a story written by my daughter, who is now 4 5/6 years old. She typed this up on this computer, so I’m just copy pasting things here. 

I find something weirdly magical about this story. No, it doesn’t only have to do with the fact that it was written by my daughter. The format of the story makes it seem like there’s some weird literary quality about it. So it makes sense to share this with the wider world.

Read and enjoy. 

 

ones simon says hi

ylou says hi

vrala mogyvoshy  says hi

vlala sintti says hi

vgurule hn says  hi

ltha says hi

mugda says hi

kartik says hi

pinky says hi

adya says hi

jeje says hi

grulmnikan says hi

fivesix says hi

tykrs says hi

cheche says hi

cunti says hi

rats says hi

ujis says hi

xeon says hi

oganesson says hi

de end

You might be wondering who the character in the second last line is. You can find it on the periodic table 🙂 (and “xeon” is a typo. She says she meant to write “xenon”)

Quizzing for toddlers

One thing we have found about our daughter is that she likes to “know things”. She is curious. Having gone beyond her “baby books” (the highly illustrated 16 page stories), she is not reading larger story books, but devouring “non-fiction” (like a book on “simple experiments”, another “big book of everything” and so on).

And so we thought she might be interested in quizzing. And a couple of months back, my wife, the more enterprising parent,  found this weekly online quiz conducted by this company called “QShala“.

These quizzes are literally above our daughter’s grade, but nobody seems to do quizzes for 4-year-olds, so my wife decided to take our daughter along for the Grade 1-3 quizzes conducted by QShala.

These would happen every Sunday afternoon at 3pm (they still do, I think), and it would be a tremendously stressful experience for everyone in the house.

  • My wife would get stressed that me, the “quizzing parent”, did nothing to encourage our daughter’s inherent interest in knowing things and building her knowledge.
  • I would get stressed that I couldn’t spend my Sunday afternoons in peace, and that my wife would expect me to take our daughter to this quiz, which I never did.
  • Our daughter would get stressed that despite getting some of the answers in the quiz and typing them out, she would never get a chance to give out the answers verbally (the QShala guys would pick out one kid at random, I think, among those that gave out the correct answers).

And despite the all-round stress, we (excluding me) kept going for these quizzes. And getting stressed out. And then my wife had a brainwave, “if you are so opposed to send her to these competitive quizzes, why don’t you start doing a quiz for her every week?”. That sounded like a good idea.

It’s been four weeks now, and it is an incredible experience. I love setting the quizzes. The big challenge for me is to set questions that are “just within/out of reach” for my daughter. Now, since she is my daughter, I have a good idea on what she knows / doesn’t know. So if you find that some of the questions here may be out of reach for a 4-year-old, it is because they have been set for MY four-year-old.

This is the first quiz I did for her, on 16th of May.

She did rather well. With some hints, she got four of the five questions. And so the following week, I went a bit tougher.

And she only got one of the five questions correct (she guessed the football jersey by correlating with the flag).

So for the third week, I went a bit easier, including some straightforward questions (rather than only “workoutable” questions).

She smashed it, getting four out of five. Rather incredibly, the only one she didn’t get in this quiz was the one involving the nursery rhyme (she seemed to have forgotten the rhymes), and then she spent the rest of that Sunday with an old Nursery Rhymes book, revising all of them. And also incredibly, she got the band right, but by recognising the “wrong” band member (Ozzy).

Of course, for the fourth quiz, I didn’t set any nursery rhymes questions (though I included a lullaby).

Again she did rather well, getting four (including one with hints). The negative surprise for me is that while she normally indexes countries on the map with objects (“UAE looks like a ‘horse bicycle'” or “Cameroon looks like a kangaroo”), she really struggled with the map question and only got it after she had seen the map.

I think the horse part we can see. I don’t know where the “bicycle” comes from

I’ve been massively enjoying the process. I will continue to set these quizzes every Sunday, and then post them to my Slideshare. You can follow me there. If I get more enthu, I might include those slides in this blogpost as well.

 

It both looks and “sounds” like Kangaroo

 

Update: Links to quizzes I did after I wrote this blogpost. 

 

 

Shopping for girls

Maybe this can be my “international women’s day” post.

We went shopping yesterday, after a very long time. We had to shop for all three of us (wife, daughter and I). And we went to a few large stores in Mantri Mall and ended up shopping in the men’s section, women’s section, girls’ section and boys’ section.

You read that right. We shopped in the boys’ section. And no, we didn’t buy anything for gifting. The reason we shopped in the boys’ section was to buy our daughter nice clothes.

Last week, union minister Smriti Irani made this statement somewhere:

The problem is that even if we as parents want to be progressive and want to bring up our daughter without creating gender biases, the world conspires to reinforce gender biases into her. We find that visiting relatives and friends gift her Barbie dolls. There is “pattern recognition” from things she sees around her (last year she shocked us by saying that it was OK for a boy to hit others but not for a girl). Boys her age are not beyond making sexist comments.

But the biggest reinforcer of childhood gender norms, we’ve seen, are clothes shops, and this is a thing we’ve seen both in the UK and in India.

For some reason, clothes manufacturers have collectively decided that the only thing little girls want to wear is bling – every shirt, and skirt, and pair of shorts, and shoes, inevitably have some frills or some bling attached to them. Beyond a point, as we are shopping, it becomes unbearable to even consider such clothes. And we naturally gravitate towards the boys’ section.

Where, for whatever reason, the selection is far more palatable. No-frill (pun intended) T-shirts and comfortable trousers are conspicuous by their abundance. The design on the printed T-shirts are far better (like last year we got her a T-shirt with the nine (clearly a pre-2005 design) planets on it, which she loves wearing). Shoes are comfortable and you can actually run in them.

At pretty much any given point of time in her entire lifetime, the daughter has owned at least half a dozen pieces of clothing that have been shopped from boys’ sections of clothes shops.

There are limitations, of course – that women’s shirts have buttons on the left means that it is easy to identify “cross-dressing” when it comes to polos and button-down shirts. A lot of boys’ clothes are franchise driven, and not the sort of franchises that my wife or I would endorse (there is an overabundance of Disney stuff, such as Marvel, and not enough heavy metal).

And we were worried that once the daughter learnt to read, she would herself start objecting to wearing clothes bought from boys’ section – thankfully, until now at least, that fear hasn’t borne out. She happily selected clothes from boys’ sections yesterday, and even bought a cute T-shirt that said “King of … “.

I really don’t know when children’s clothes designers and merchandisers realise that girls want nice clothes as well – and not just frills and bling. Until then, as long as the daughter approves that is, we’ll be shopping in the boys’ section.

Is handwriting hereditary?

I don’t know the answer to that question. However, I have a theory on how handwriting passes on down the generations.

So my daughter goes to a montessori. There they don’t teach them to read and write at a very early age (I could read by the time I was 2.5, but she learnt to read only recently, when she was nearing 4). And there is a structured process to recognising letters (or “sounds” as they call them) and to be able to draw them.

There are these sandpaper letters that the school has, and children are encouraged to “trace” them, using two fingers, so they know how the letters “flow”. And then this tracing helps first in identifying the sounds, and later writing them.

With school having been washed out pretty much all of this year, we have been starved of these resources. Instead, over a 2 hour Zoom call one Saturday in July, the teachers helped parents make “sound cards” by writing using a marker on handmade paper (another feature of Montessori is the introduction of cursive sounds at a young age. Children learn to write cursive before they learn to write print, if at all).

So when Berry has to learn how a particular sound is to be written, it is these cards that I have written that she has to turn to (she knows that different fonts exist in terms of reading, but that she should write in cursive when writing). She essentially traces the sounds that I have written with two fingers.

And then in the next step, I write the sounds on a slate (apparently it’s important to do this before graduating to pencil), and then she uses a different coloured chalk and traces over them. Once again she effectively traces my handwriting. Then earlier this week, during a “parent and child zoom class” organised by her school, she wanted to write a word and wasn’t able to write the full word in cursive and asked for my help. I held her hand and made her write it. My handwriting again!

Now that I realise why she seems to be getting influenced by my handwriting, I should maybe hand over full responsibility of teaching writing to the wife, whose handwriting is far superior to mine.

The trigger for this post was my opening of a notebook in which I had made notes during a meeting earlier this week (I usually use the notes app on the computer but had made an exception). Two things struck me before I started reading my notes – that my handwriting is similar to my father’s, and my handwriting is horrible (easily much worse than my father’s). And then I was reminded of earlier this week when I held my daughter’s hand and made her write.

This is how handwriting runs in the family.

Yet another initiation

I’m still reeling from the Merseyside derby. It had been a long time since a game of football so emotionally drained me. In fact, the last time I remember getting a fever (literally) while watching a game of football was in the exact same fixture in 2013, which had ended 3-3 thanks to a Daniel Sturridge equaliser towards the end.

In any case, my fever (which I’ve now recovered from) and emotional exhaustion is not the reason today’s match will be memorable. It also happens to be a sort of initiation of my daughter as a bonafide Liverpool fan.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Initiating @abherikarthik to the Merseyside derby. #ynwa #lfc

A post shared by Karthik S (@skthewimp) on

It’s been a sort of trend in recent times (at least since the lockdown) that Liverpool games have been scheduled for late evenings or late night India times.  That has meant that I haven’t been able to involve the daughter, who on most days goes to bed at seven, in the football.

She has seen me watch highlights of Liverpool games. She admires the “Liverpool. We are Champions” poster that I had ordered after last season’s Premier League victory, and have since stuck on the walls of our study. She knows I’ve been a fan of Liverpool for a long time now (it dates to more than eleven years before she was born).

However, till date, after she had truly started understand stuff (she is four now), we had never watched a game together. And so when it was announced that the Everton-Liverpool game would be held at 5pm IST, I decided it was time for initiation.

I had casually slipped it to her on Tuesday (or so) that “on Saturday, we will be watching football together. And we will have drinks and snacks along with it”. And then on Wednesday she asked me what day of the week it was. “So how many days to Saturday”, she asked. When I asked her what was special about the coming Saturday, she let out a happy scream saying “football party!!”. On the same day she had informed her mother that we both were “going to have a football party on Saturday”, and that her mother was not welcome.

She’s spent the last three days looking forward to today. At four o’clock today, as I was “busy” watching the IPL game, she expressed her disappointment that I had not yet started preparing for the party. I finally swung into action around 4:30 (though a shopping trip in the morning had taken care of most of the prep).

A popcorn packet was put into the microwave. The potato chips packet (from a local “Sai hot chips” store) was opened, and part of its contents poured into a bowl. I showed her the bottles of fresh fruit juice that I had got, that had been pushed to me by a promoter at the local Namdhari’s store. Initially opting for the orange juice, she later said she wanted the “berry smoothie”. I poured it into a small wine glass that she likes. A can of diet coke and some Haldiram salted peanuts for me, and we were set.

I was pleasantly surprised that she sat still on the couch with me pretty much for the length of the match (she’s generally the restless types, like me). She tied the Liverpool scarf around her in many different ways. She gorged on the snacks (popcorn, potato chips and pomegranate in the first half; nachos with ketchup in the second). She kept asking who is winning. She kept asking me “where Liverpool was from” after I told her that “Everton are from Liverpool”.

I explained to her the concept of football, and goals. Once in the second half she was curious to see Adrian in the Liverpool goal, and that she “hadn’t seen the Liverpool goal in a long time”. Presently, Dominic Calvert-Lewin equalised to make it 2-2, giving her the glimpse of the goal she had so desired.

At the end of the game, she couldn’t grasp the concept of a draw. “But who won?”, she kept asking. She didn’t grasp the concept of offside either, though it possibly didn’t help that Liverpool seemed to play a far deeper line today than they have this season.

I’m glad that she had such an interesting game to make her “football watching debut”. Not technically, of course, since I remember cradling her on my lap when Jose Mourinho parked two Manchester United buses at Anfield (she was a month old then), and that had been a dreadful game.

A friend told me that I should “let her make her own choices” and not foist my club affiliations on her. Let’s see where this goes.

 

Ending a 33-year-old wait

When I was in upper kindergarten (UKG) in 1987-88, my teacher Chandrika Aunty had shown me how to do thread painting. It was a fascinating exercise. Cover a thread in paint, and then let it lie in a random pattern inside a folded piece of paper, and then pull out the thread. It creates a beautiful and symmetrical (thanks to the folding) pattern in the paper.

To my dismay, Chandrika Aunty failed to repeat this exercise, instead spending time to teach us other kinds of painting such as dipping ladies fingers in paint (I’ve always loathed ladies finger as a vegetable, so you can imagine my not being enthused by using it as a block-print).

Somehow my mother (who was generally interested in painting) wasn’t interested in doing this either. So as much as I loved it, I never ended up doing thread painting again as a child.

All that changed a few days back. With the lockdown on, my daughter’s school has been sending her “assignments” to do at home. Now, I find most of these assignments rather stressful. Sometimes they make me wonder what’s the point of sending her to a Montessori at all, if they are giving here homework that I have to supervise (thankfully none of these need to necessarily need to be turned in. They’re more for keeping her occupied. But looking at them as “pending” on the Google Classroom irritates me).

However, there was one assignment that I was rather excited to see. Thread painting! We sat on it for a few days without doing (basically NED happened). However, it was my wife’s birthday yesterday, and when we sat down to make a card for her on Tuesday, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do thread painting.

And so we did, using a small string and water colour tablets (I was so excited by the idea of thread painting that I didn’t bother following the school’s instructions). Apply water to the colour tablet, put the thread on it (and use the brush to make sure the paint was coated on the thread). Then put it in a random pattern between the folded sheets. And then pull it out carefully (the last bit was done by the daughter with great interest).

This was the result:

I’m rather excited by this. For someone artistically challenged like me, this is a nice way to make nice-looking images.

I don’t intend to do a Chandrika Aunty. I plan to do thread painting on a regular basis with the daughter. It’s both fun to do and produces nice results, like what you see here.

The rest of her school assignments can remain undone. I don’t care.