Tag: fatherhood

High command and higher command

Last week a friend messaged me early in the evening and asked if we could meet for drinks later in the evening. I almost replied to him saying that I’ll get back to him once I’d “checked with High Command”, but then realised that I now have not one but two high commands.

Just the previous day, I had watched Liverpool FC play at Manchester City. This was the first time I was watching live football this season, primarily because we don’t have cable at home. Since I didn’t want to “jinx Liverpool“, I waited for a game where they were not the favourites to make my watching debut, and Manchester City away seemed like the best bet for that.

When I told the senior high command that I wanted to go watch this game, and if she could take care of the junior high command during the duration of it, she had no objections. Just as I was about to leave for the game, though, the junior high command (or maybe I should call her the higher command) decided to throw a tantrum. Some distractions and the promise to watch endless episodes of Bing and Pablo were required to allow me to step out.

The next day, I was pretty sure that the high command would be cool with me going out for evening drinks. We had discussed our lives at the turn of the year, and had agreed that we should meet more people, and I had specifically made it a point that I’d go out more on evenings and weekends. Still being early in the year, I knew the high command would be okay with me going out. I wasn’t sure if the higher command would be okay though.

The story played out the same way as the previous day. I picked up higher command from the nursery. High command then returned from office, and it was time for me to step out. And higher command wasn’t pleased at all. Once again it took distractions to allow me to step out. And it turned out that the price of the bribe was rather high that evening. When I returned, the higher command was watching Bing, and didn’t even turn around to look at me (normally she’s all over me when I come home from anywhere).

Another friend just asked me if we can meet on Wednesday evening. Again I was about to type “let me check with the high command”, and then decided it is prudent to make that plural. Once again I know the high command will be okay with this but the higher command may not be.

Mini me

Two years back when we were expecting, relatives would wonder if it would be a “mini Priyanka” or “mini Karthik”. This was their way of wondering whether it would be a girl or a boy. Having spent the first half of the pregnancy in Spain, we knew that it would be a girl, but in most cases refused to answer this “mini Priyanka/Karthik” question.

In hindsight, it’s a bit annoying – to assume that the kid is the mini version of the parent she shares her gender (or should I be saying “sex”, as a Brooklyn-based friend recently remarked) with. What makes people simply assume that a girl should be like her mother and a boy should be like his father, when it is clear that irrespective of sex (take that Brooklyn, I got it right) the kid receives the same number of chromosomes from each parent.

And as it happens, our specimen is a clear exhibit of being like the parent of the opposite sex. She might be a mini Priyanka in that she is a girl, but that and her Bambi eyes apart, she is uncannily like me in pretty much everything else. In fact, upon seeing her as a baby, her godmother remarked that “Karthik could have married an old shoe and still produced a child that looks exactly like this”.

The specimen in question

Save for her eyes, she looks nearly exactly the same way as I did at her age. Just like me, she’s outgoing, and likes to go aimlessly wandering (to go “on beat” as we would say in Kannada). For the large part, she likes the same kind of foods that I like (a notable exception is her affinity for Maggi). Just like me, she looks out for cashewnuts or peanuts in whatever food she is having.

This list is a long one, with the list of her similarities with her mother being much much shorter.

And on top of all this, she is also attached to me. She doesn’t let me get out of home without insisting that I take her along (I clearly remember doing this a lot to my father as well), while she happily says “bye” to her mother. When she wakes up, she starts screaming “appa” and “ka” (short for “kara” which is short for “Karthik”. it’s a nickname used mainly by my wife and one of my cousins). She calls out to me from the other end of the house in a way she’s never called out to her mother. And she doesn’t trouble me like she troubles her mother!

I had been told by several people that fatherhood can change you, but one thing I hadn’t bargained for was that it would make me more emotional. But then I guess having a little version of you who you can totally empathise with around can do that to you!