A teenager is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma sprayed with a noxious cloud of Axe deodorant.
Maybe I should just say “deo,” because that is how these companies choose to describe their products, no doubt armed with market data that many of their targeted customers lack the attention span or reading skills to grasp the full word.
Since the time Churchill remarked on the weirdness of Russia, it morphed into the Soviet Union and subsequently disintegrated with barely a whimper. The enigma of teenagers remains uncipherable.
I’m sure all of us parents of adolescent and teenage boys have data that could well join us together as subjects of a significant national study that attempts to shed light on a matter that perplexes us:
How is it that the bars of soap and tubes of toothpaste in our sons’ bathrooms don’t seem to diminish despite their purported use? But the Axe deodorant is drained in less than a month.
How is it that a bottle of shampoo that has been standing on the counter for almost a year still feels full, but tubes and jars of hair gel have flown off the same counter and replaced many times?
I have to admit those Axe ads are masterfully manipulative. They have boys aspiring to puberty, and boys who never got over it, spraying themselves. And not just a modest squirt. No-o. They have to mist it up and down and around their bodies so they can walk around like stinkbombs that have women gagging instead of reaching to rip their bodices.
How is it that boys who can crack trigonometry and pooh-pooh their little sisters' worship of Cinderella have trouble disbelieving an ad that tells them that fumigating themselves with cheap perfume masquerading as pheromones will make every female who catches a whiff become a panting slave? Okay, I'm willing to admit that even if they do disbelieve the propaganda, they're still taking no chances.
When I was a teenager, you couldn’t really buy deodorant, at least not any that was made in India. You showered twice a day in the summer and coated yourself with talcum powder to absorb the sweaty sheen on your body. Soap and water were the best beauty products you could count on, we were told. And that made sense: we didn’t have much more than soap and water. Even shampoo was a luxury product until the late 1970s.
Now that soap is cheaper than ever and available in so many brands that you can fill an entire aisle in a store, it suddenly isn’t so cool any more. Even friends who grew up with Rexona think nothing of spending ridiculous amounts of money buying soap from specialty boutiques in malls, where the soap is displayed and weighed (and priced) like premium confectionery.
Nowadays you can wash hands with a drop of alcohol gel and no water (yup! it is supposedly more potent against the H1N1 virus than soap and water). You can stroll like the Pied Piper and be trailed by an army of sexually ravenous females because they’ve just breathed a whiff of your irresistible deo spray. So hey, what moron needs soap?
I demand that soap -- sensible, old-fashioned soap -- gets its due. Hey, teenagers: soap is an underdog. Stand up for it. Don't fall for the propaganda of greedy corporations who are just selling you canned air and depleting the ozone layer faster than you want to deplete girls. And have mercy on your gagging parents.
Showing posts with label Parenting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parenting. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
Fastforwarded Into Fogeyhood
My daughter once pronounced twenty as the cutoff age for someone who is old.
By this count, I've been old for most of my life. Yet I brazenly pass birthday after birthday feeling not a bit older, let alone old. Sprightly as I may feel, when I talk to my children about my childhood, I come across as being positively ancient.
I thought you became an old fogey after you face looks like scratchpaper scribbled with all the wrinkles life throws your way. You walk slowly. You know you’re not far from the end of your journey, and you’re in no hurry to get their fast, so it’s just as well your knees force you to go slow. You wear clothes that belong to a different decade. And when you describe your life, people chuckle as though what you said could hardly be true.
Well, the last of the three hallmarks of fogeyhood holds true for me, so I guess I've entered fogeydom in my forties.
Ancient is what my grandmother seemed to me when she talked about the way things were when she was little. She was probably in her 50s then, and yet everything she said sounded so faraway, practically historical.
Back when I was in primary school, about my daughter's age, 10 paise could buy a few mouthfuls of of paani puri on the sidewalk in my neighborhood, or a puri with a little piece of potato tucked in at our school tuck shop. Getting 25 paise back then made me feel positively rich. If my grandmother saw us trying to haggle up the ten paise to something more generous, she would shake her head and tell us how worthless money had become. Why, when she was young, she could buy a princely amount of practically for that 10 paise.
The denomination she mostly got by with when she was young, the pai, was a museum coin for us. Now, I feel ancient when I give spending money to my children. A rupee buys just a little piece of candy. Ten rupees seems barely adequate but will buy a bag of junk food. I usually end up shelling out much, much more. When I tell my children how getting a rupee was rare treat, their faces flicker with pity and disbelief. (And hey, where’s the reverence?)
"Back when I was little" was just three or four decades away, and does indeed seem far away. It's not just the money. It's describing how I lived.
It's hard for my children to imagine I had no television until middle school, and it was black and white. That when we watched televised cricket test matches, we would crank up the cricket commentary on the radio and mute the television because television was so amateurishly awkward.
It is hard for them to believe that one of my errands constituted knocking on a neighbor's door to ask if she could please chill in her fridge for a few hours the bowl of vanilla custard my mother had sent me with.
Or that we could get power outages that could go on for half a day, and that I would do my homework by the light of a kerosene lantern that was replaced by a car-battery powered tubelight when I was in high school.
That I preferred to use a kitchen knife to sharpen pencils because domestically made sharpeners were so useless and imported ones too expensive. That the first time I finished a whole candy bar by myself was after I went to college in the United States. I'd always shared them with family or friends in India. Or that I once fell off the back of a scooter as it sped down a main road in Jamshedpur, but still didn't get run over because there were hardly any other cars on the road back then.
My children find it quaint that my family used a rotary telephone, which my father still owns. Once, I tried to describe to them what a cross-connection was, and how hilarious these muddled conversations, with strangers shouting faintly in the background, could be. I felt like a time traveller, waving my arms, over-explaining everything, and still getting nowhere: Why my siblings and I used to find these so amusing that we would shout out and call everyone over to cup their hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and listen, how we’d grab the receiver in turns and laugh at what was cutting-edge eavesdropping in my time. How strange it is for them to imagine that we used to book long distance calls ahead, and that telegrams were considered speedy because they arrived in a day.
Then I was thinking today that when I was little, our father and uncles wore trousers most of the time, but most of my older male relatives wore dhotis. I remember my grandfather pleating his crisp, white dhoti and patting the folds down as he sang hymns. There was a whole array of clothes that generation of middle-class shopkeepers and traders wore daily that their children, my father's generation - the westernized young - discontinued wearing. Hand-made slippers. Tailored undershirts in super-thin cotton, with a secret pocket over abdomen or chest to carry cash from the shop. I remember thinking how stylish those garments were, even though they looked dated to us children. Now, they're practically historical for urban Indians.
We live in times when everything gets improved, updated, upgraded moments after it is created. Messages to loved ones reach a split second of being sent. Our children write with dancing thumbs, a digit that clearly was a silent valet to the forefinger in our days.
Amazing as all this seems to us, it’s all going to seem clunky and ancient to our children’s children.
So I suppose it is a just reward, for living in such fast times, that we get to become fogeys before we’ve even wriggled out of middle age.
I felt really grown-up, with the burden of the world on my shoulders, when I turned 20. I've had more birthdays since and have enjoyed each without feeling old. Along the way, I've collected crowns on my teeth and reading glasses, but I've never ever felt that I've become old. The only time I feel old as a stagecoach standing next to a convertible is when I see my children's faces when I tell them about my childhood.
By this count, I've been old for most of my life. Yet I brazenly pass birthday after birthday feeling not a bit older, let alone old. Sprightly as I may feel, when I talk to my children about my childhood, I come across as being positively ancient.
I thought you became an old fogey after you face looks like scratchpaper scribbled with all the wrinkles life throws your way. You walk slowly. You know you’re not far from the end of your journey, and you’re in no hurry to get their fast, so it’s just as well your knees force you to go slow. You wear clothes that belong to a different decade. And when you describe your life, people chuckle as though what you said could hardly be true.
Well, the last of the three hallmarks of fogeyhood holds true for me, so I guess I've entered fogeydom in my forties.
Ancient is what my grandmother seemed to me when she talked about the way things were when she was little. She was probably in her 50s then, and yet everything she said sounded so faraway, practically historical.
Back when I was in primary school, about my daughter's age, 10 paise could buy a few mouthfuls of of paani puri on the sidewalk in my neighborhood, or a puri with a little piece of potato tucked in at our school tuck shop. Getting 25 paise back then made me feel positively rich. If my grandmother saw us trying to haggle up the ten paise to something more generous, she would shake her head and tell us how worthless money had become. Why, when she was young, she could buy a princely amount of practically for that 10 paise.
The denomination she mostly got by with when she was young, the pai, was a museum coin for us. Now, I feel ancient when I give spending money to my children. A rupee buys just a little piece of candy. Ten rupees seems barely adequate but will buy a bag of junk food. I usually end up shelling out much, much more. When I tell my children how getting a rupee was rare treat, their faces flicker with pity and disbelief. (And hey, where’s the reverence?)
"Back when I was little" was just three or four decades away, and does indeed seem far away. It's not just the money. It's describing how I lived.
It's hard for my children to imagine I had no television until middle school, and it was black and white. That when we watched televised cricket test matches, we would crank up the cricket commentary on the radio and mute the television because television was so amateurishly awkward.
It is hard for them to believe that one of my errands constituted knocking on a neighbor's door to ask if she could please chill in her fridge for a few hours the bowl of vanilla custard my mother had sent me with.
Or that we could get power outages that could go on for half a day, and that I would do my homework by the light of a kerosene lantern that was replaced by a car-battery powered tubelight when I was in high school.
That I preferred to use a kitchen knife to sharpen pencils because domestically made sharpeners were so useless and imported ones too expensive. That the first time I finished a whole candy bar by myself was after I went to college in the United States. I'd always shared them with family or friends in India. Or that I once fell off the back of a scooter as it sped down a main road in Jamshedpur, but still didn't get run over because there were hardly any other cars on the road back then.
My children find it quaint that my family used a rotary telephone, which my father still owns. Once, I tried to describe to them what a cross-connection was, and how hilarious these muddled conversations, with strangers shouting faintly in the background, could be. I felt like a time traveller, waving my arms, over-explaining everything, and still getting nowhere: Why my siblings and I used to find these so amusing that we would shout out and call everyone over to cup their hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and listen, how we’d grab the receiver in turns and laugh at what was cutting-edge eavesdropping in my time. How strange it is for them to imagine that we used to book long distance calls ahead, and that telegrams were considered speedy because they arrived in a day.
Then I was thinking today that when I was little, our father and uncles wore trousers most of the time, but most of my older male relatives wore dhotis. I remember my grandfather pleating his crisp, white dhoti and patting the folds down as he sang hymns. There was a whole array of clothes that generation of middle-class shopkeepers and traders wore daily that their children, my father's generation - the westernized young - discontinued wearing. Hand-made slippers. Tailored undershirts in super-thin cotton, with a secret pocket over abdomen or chest to carry cash from the shop. I remember thinking how stylish those garments were, even though they looked dated to us children. Now, they're practically historical for urban Indians.
We live in times when everything gets improved, updated, upgraded moments after it is created. Messages to loved ones reach a split second of being sent. Our children write with dancing thumbs, a digit that clearly was a silent valet to the forefinger in our days.
Amazing as all this seems to us, it’s all going to seem clunky and ancient to our children’s children.
So I suppose it is a just reward, for living in such fast times, that we get to become fogeys before we’ve even wriggled out of middle age.
I felt really grown-up, with the burden of the world on my shoulders, when I turned 20. I've had more birthdays since and have enjoyed each without feeling old. Along the way, I've collected crowns on my teeth and reading glasses, but I've never ever felt that I've become old. The only time I feel old as a stagecoach standing next to a convertible is when I see my children's faces when I tell them about my childhood.
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Mommy Dictionary
Preity Zinta stroked her smooth, hairless limbs in the television ad.
“I want to get my hair removed, too,” announced one of my children.
I had a stock answer along the lines of: And so you shall. Some day, when you’re older.
Actually, I was grateful the depilatory cream caught her attention. There are dozens of explicit ads, some completely unfit for viewing at family time, that routinely get broadcast on Indian television.
Condoms. Contraceptives. Abortion pills. (“I didn't take any precautions last night ..." Magic product appears. "Now I have no chinta, only honey! Let’s bang away, tension-free!”)
Liquor and cigarettes ads are not permitted on TV, and for good reason. But if there’s anything concerning reproduction, body fluids and skin rashes that involve violent itching, hey, bring it on.
Now I’m up to discussing any of these subjects openly with my children. It’s just that I’d rather not be ambushed with them while we’re in the middle of watching Psych together, with dinner plates in front of us. That is not a time I want my family to be assaulted by graphic information on the consequences of not being protected from accidents and leaks involving the human body.
But I guess parents can never be prepared for the questions their kids choose to ask them, or when.
“What’s intercourse?” my younger child asked me, out of the blue, last week.
“Where did you come across that word?” I asked, trying to sound indifferent.
“These two teachers were talking and I was walking by and I heard one of them say “They had intercourse.”
Hmm, teachers! And it’s not like they were discussing the intercourse of art and science. They were clearly talking about people. I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t use the f- word on campus within earshot of children. But now there was something more Victorian and priestly to explain.
Intercourse, I explained, was the exchange or intermingling of things. Sometimes, people use it to mean having sex, I added. “Yuck,” she said, twisting her lips in disgust. And she was ready to talk about something else.
She could have looked up “intercourse” in the dictionary, too, except that the dictionary wouldn’t have interlaced hands like I did during my rambling, but mostly adequate explanation.
The dictionary was the default source of information for me when I was young and curious. My mother was prudish, and my father left discussions of all matters related to human plumbing to my mother, so the subject never came up. When it did, occasionally, it got shushed away.
I remember once overhearing my mother and her friend talking about a movie character who became a “pros,” which I gathered was a bad person even though I had never heard the word before. It’s not as if I eavesdropped. They were having a conversation right in my presence, but assumed that I was invisible or heard nothing. Later, I asked my mother what a “pros” was. She looked at me as though I had just told her I wanted to become one. Her cold, disapproving voice informed me that such words were for “adults” to know, and that I should never mention such a bad word ever again.
I took her lesson to heart. I never asked her about such words again. I just looked them up quietly in the dictionary ... and found the meanings of lots of forbidden “adult” words that were thrilling and disgusting.
The day I looked up “pros,” I also learned the meanings of “proscenium,” prosthesis, and “prostitute.” And after the way my mother had ticked me off, I was so expecting to be shocked by the definition of “prostitute,” but it didn’t even make my eyes pop.
My dictionary was a good confidant and companion. It offered up anything I wanted to know, without judging me. I learned the meanings of words I was looking for, and those I ran into because they were just hanging around the neighborhood. I could even open it up in full view of my mother and look up filth with scholarly diligence.
I would have loved to have my mom talk to me about the words I secretly looked up, but she was too prim. In her world, kids were too pristine to know about certain things. They just figured them out when they became “adult.” She had been raised in a devout household where they didn’t even know such blasphemous words existed. I can understand her awkwardness now, though I certainly think that as a rational, free adult, she could have made a choice to at least resist such ignorance, even a little bit, instead of raising her kids behind the same veil of silence. I pieced together the facts of life from whatever I gleaned from secret whispers, dirty jokes and high school anatomy lessons.
We have lots of dictionaries in our home. But I’m glad my kids don’t feel inhibited about throwing any question at me. I’m surprised they know about things I hadn’t even heard about at their age, but I’m glad to give them a straight answer.
“I want to get my hair removed, too,” announced one of my children.
I had a stock answer along the lines of: And so you shall. Some day, when you’re older.
Actually, I was grateful the depilatory cream caught her attention. There are dozens of explicit ads, some completely unfit for viewing at family time, that routinely get broadcast on Indian television.
Condoms. Contraceptives. Abortion pills. (“I didn't take any precautions last night ..." Magic product appears. "Now I have no chinta, only honey! Let’s bang away, tension-free!”)
Liquor and cigarettes ads are not permitted on TV, and for good reason. But if there’s anything concerning reproduction, body fluids and skin rashes that involve violent itching, hey, bring it on.
Now I’m up to discussing any of these subjects openly with my children. It’s just that I’d rather not be ambushed with them while we’re in the middle of watching Psych together, with dinner plates in front of us. That is not a time I want my family to be assaulted by graphic information on the consequences of not being protected from accidents and leaks involving the human body.
But I guess parents can never be prepared for the questions their kids choose to ask them, or when.
“What’s intercourse?” my younger child asked me, out of the blue, last week.
“Where did you come across that word?” I asked, trying to sound indifferent.
“These two teachers were talking and I was walking by and I heard one of them say “They had intercourse.”
Hmm, teachers! And it’s not like they were discussing the intercourse of art and science. They were clearly talking about people. I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t use the f- word on campus within earshot of children. But now there was something more Victorian and priestly to explain.
Intercourse, I explained, was the exchange or intermingling of things. Sometimes, people use it to mean having sex, I added. “Yuck,” she said, twisting her lips in disgust. And she was ready to talk about something else.
She could have looked up “intercourse” in the dictionary, too, except that the dictionary wouldn’t have interlaced hands like I did during my rambling, but mostly adequate explanation.
The dictionary was the default source of information for me when I was young and curious. My mother was prudish, and my father left discussions of all matters related to human plumbing to my mother, so the subject never came up. When it did, occasionally, it got shushed away.
I remember once overhearing my mother and her friend talking about a movie character who became a “pros,” which I gathered was a bad person even though I had never heard the word before. It’s not as if I eavesdropped. They were having a conversation right in my presence, but assumed that I was invisible or heard nothing. Later, I asked my mother what a “pros” was. She looked at me as though I had just told her I wanted to become one. Her cold, disapproving voice informed me that such words were for “adults” to know, and that I should never mention such a bad word ever again.
I took her lesson to heart. I never asked her about such words again. I just looked them up quietly in the dictionary ... and found the meanings of lots of forbidden “adult” words that were thrilling and disgusting.
The day I looked up “pros,” I also learned the meanings of “proscenium,” prosthesis, and “prostitute.” And after the way my mother had ticked me off, I was so expecting to be shocked by the definition of “prostitute,” but it didn’t even make my eyes pop.
My dictionary was a good confidant and companion. It offered up anything I wanted to know, without judging me. I learned the meanings of words I was looking for, and those I ran into because they were just hanging around the neighborhood. I could even open it up in full view of my mother and look up filth with scholarly diligence.
I would have loved to have my mom talk to me about the words I secretly looked up, but she was too prim. In her world, kids were too pristine to know about certain things. They just figured them out when they became “adult.” She had been raised in a devout household where they didn’t even know such blasphemous words existed. I can understand her awkwardness now, though I certainly think that as a rational, free adult, she could have made a choice to at least resist such ignorance, even a little bit, instead of raising her kids behind the same veil of silence. I pieced together the facts of life from whatever I gleaned from secret whispers, dirty jokes and high school anatomy lessons.
We have lots of dictionaries in our home. But I’m glad my kids don’t feel inhibited about throwing any question at me. I’m surprised they know about things I hadn’t even heard about at their age, but I’m glad to give them a straight answer.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Swine Flu
The school calendar for this time of year is loaded enough with holidays:
Varamahalakshmi (I never got that day off when I was a kid).
Independence Day (polish shoes and badges extra shiny, show up at school for flag raising, lots of extra homework... how did I ever consider this a holiday?)
Janmashtami and Ganesh Chaturthi (didn’t get both these either).
Deduct a few days of attendance because of the coughs and colds kids pass to each other in the rainy season.
Then, faster than you could say gesundheit, dozens of city schools shut down indefinitely. Even pre-schoolers can tell you the name of the new long school holiday: Swine Flu.
The newspapers are splashed with photos of scared-looking people wearing surgical masks doing yagyas, with smaller, buried headlines (that’s how they attempt to show balanced coverage) stating there is no cause for panic.
My children’s school has sensibly remained open despite the city-wide scare. Why shut down? There was no directive from the government’s education or health departments recommending a shut down for schools. Our school let parents know that children with any cold symptoms should be kept at home.
My ever-prepared daughter packed a bottle of hand sanitizer in her book bag. What fun to open a bottle of cold, nice-smelling, squishy stuff in class and have other kids ask if they could please, please, get a little drop too. It’s a girl thing. I remember the little sachets of wet tissues from airlines I would hoard in my sanitizer-less childhood. On extra hot days, I would unfold one cold square with slow drama, and pass around the cologne-scented icons of luxury travel to my circle of cousins. I was the only one who had ever flown on a plane once, briefly, as an infant. Of course, I had no recall of that heavenly experience and only knew about it because my parents told me. Still, that made me special; I had been closest to where angels and fairies might live. Girls are programmed to take ordinary little objects and use them in elaborate and sometimes twisted rituals of belonging.
Boys are more direct. My son already regards soap as an invention as pointless as homework but submits to it from time to time. Hand sanitizer in his school backpack … now, that’s pushing it. Even fear of the swine flu virus hasn’t pierced his sunny, invincible disposition into buckling to something as effeminate as hand sanitizer. He squirted a bit on his palm last week and was quick to underline it wasn’t due to any namby pamby germ fear. “Umm, alcohol,” he said, with slow, taunting relish, to show me he already has a manly recognition of a distant relative of beer and other forbidden liquids. His friend’s eyes popped with awe.
He usually gets a rise out of me, but this time I didn’t react. I can handle swine flu. The virus cannot resist high temperatures. I’m the mother of a teenager. I can.
Varamahalakshmi (I never got that day off when I was a kid).
Independence Day (polish shoes and badges extra shiny, show up at school for flag raising, lots of extra homework... how did I ever consider this a holiday?)
Janmashtami and Ganesh Chaturthi (didn’t get both these either).
Deduct a few days of attendance because of the coughs and colds kids pass to each other in the rainy season.
Then, faster than you could say gesundheit, dozens of city schools shut down indefinitely. Even pre-schoolers can tell you the name of the new long school holiday: Swine Flu.
The newspapers are splashed with photos of scared-looking people wearing surgical masks doing yagyas, with smaller, buried headlines (that’s how they attempt to show balanced coverage) stating there is no cause for panic.
My children’s school has sensibly remained open despite the city-wide scare. Why shut down? There was no directive from the government’s education or health departments recommending a shut down for schools. Our school let parents know that children with any cold symptoms should be kept at home.
My ever-prepared daughter packed a bottle of hand sanitizer in her book bag. What fun to open a bottle of cold, nice-smelling, squishy stuff in class and have other kids ask if they could please, please, get a little drop too. It’s a girl thing. I remember the little sachets of wet tissues from airlines I would hoard in my sanitizer-less childhood. On extra hot days, I would unfold one cold square with slow drama, and pass around the cologne-scented icons of luxury travel to my circle of cousins. I was the only one who had ever flown on a plane once, briefly, as an infant. Of course, I had no recall of that heavenly experience and only knew about it because my parents told me. Still, that made me special; I had been closest to where angels and fairies might live. Girls are programmed to take ordinary little objects and use them in elaborate and sometimes twisted rituals of belonging.
Boys are more direct. My son already regards soap as an invention as pointless as homework but submits to it from time to time. Hand sanitizer in his school backpack … now, that’s pushing it. Even fear of the swine flu virus hasn’t pierced his sunny, invincible disposition into buckling to something as effeminate as hand sanitizer. He squirted a bit on his palm last week and was quick to underline it wasn’t due to any namby pamby germ fear. “Umm, alcohol,” he said, with slow, taunting relish, to show me he already has a manly recognition of a distant relative of beer and other forbidden liquids. His friend’s eyes popped with awe.
He usually gets a rise out of me, but this time I didn’t react. I can handle swine flu. The virus cannot resist high temperatures. I’m the mother of a teenager. I can.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Of Gods and Parents
Janmashtami is around the corner and the gaudy Ganesh statues arrayed on pavements signal that Ganesh Chaturthi is not far away.
Ganesh is hands down my favorite deity. The elephant-headed god thinks on his feet, loves sweets, has lots of body confidence despite his girth, and merely thinking of him is supposed to be good for procrastinators like me.
He’s cute and chubby and a kid at heart. But when I tell the story of Ganesh to my younger child, her forehead sets in a frown. “I don’t like that,” she declares when I come to the part about Shiva lopping off Ganesh’s head in fury. She’s a funny one. She’ll protest, “Don’t change the channel, I want to SEE that!” when I pound the TV remote as soon as a close-up of a dead body or a gushing wound unexpectedly appears on screen. She stares at the screen with an unblinking interest that disturbs me. But she is troubled by the story of how Ganesh lost his head and ended up with an elephant’s.
I can why this story would be unsettling. What parent – and especially a god, for god’s sake – would do this to a child?
It’s hard enough for a mortal like me to explain this story to my children. However Ganesh’s mother Parvati manage to explain this to him? “Daddy got so angry one day, he cut your head off. But he was very, very sorry and said he would replace it first thing in the morning…. Yes honey, it is an elephant’s head but I want you to know you’re very special, and we love you very, very much.”
I enjoy reading and telling mythological stories to my children. They’re colorful as stories and resonate with layers upon layers of symbolic meaning.
And I find them reassuring and empowering as a parent. I’ve been known to lose my temper and am glad I don’t have a third eye because I would have caused some serious, regrettable damage with it. But compared to Shiva, I’m not doing too badly in the parenting department.
What a wonderful luxury! Our legends provide provide us with the delicious paradox of being able to venerate our gods and goddesses and still being able to notch higher behavior points than some of them. Look at all those gods and goddesses and heroes and the messes they got themselves in and out of. Most of them had such dysfunctional families and complicated lives, yet they all turned out happy and fine and interesting and mostly put together. And people in India have had the scoop on their shenanigans for thousands of years and still worship them.
Look at Krishna. How dissipated and lost he might be in today’s world, although he did just fine in his time. You can imagine a therapist giving him a dressing down: “I know you’re struggling to overcome the trauma of being a foster child. You are addicted to dairy products. Eating so much butter since childhood places you in a high-risk category for heart attacks. You have a history of stalking women. The court order obtained by the gopis states that you must maintain a minimum distance of 50 yards between yourself and them, yet you consistently violate it. And your neighbors complain you play the flute loudly at all odd hours. How can you expect people to continue worshipping you if you exhibit such poor self-control and continue to flout the law?”
A culture that is not afraid to vest its gods with frailties and can see beyond their imperfections and worship them despite their flaws century after century has to be both blind and andar-se strong.
Our gods stuff themselves with laddoos till they burst, chase women, bend rules when they want to. They are extensions of ourselves, but with divine powers. They are our superheroes.
America has Superman and Batman and Captain America and hosts of superheroes dashing about in capes. We have our gods and goddesses. That is why a copycat modern superhero like the flabby Shaktiman in his wrinkled nylon bodysuit is a dud who will never capture our imaginations in the same way.
Our flawed, carbo-loading, multi-armed, third-eye incinerating superheroes rule our imaginations. That is why we haven’t tired of hearing and re-telling their stories for 5,000 years, and my children will pass them on to theirs.
Ganesh is hands down my favorite deity. The elephant-headed god thinks on his feet, loves sweets, has lots of body confidence despite his girth, and merely thinking of him is supposed to be good for procrastinators like me.
He’s cute and chubby and a kid at heart. But when I tell the story of Ganesh to my younger child, her forehead sets in a frown. “I don’t like that,” she declares when I come to the part about Shiva lopping off Ganesh’s head in fury. She’s a funny one. She’ll protest, “Don’t change the channel, I want to SEE that!” when I pound the TV remote as soon as a close-up of a dead body or a gushing wound unexpectedly appears on screen. She stares at the screen with an unblinking interest that disturbs me. But she is troubled by the story of how Ganesh lost his head and ended up with an elephant’s.
I can why this story would be unsettling. What parent – and especially a god, for god’s sake – would do this to a child?
It’s hard enough for a mortal like me to explain this story to my children. However Ganesh’s mother Parvati manage to explain this to him? “Daddy got so angry one day, he cut your head off. But he was very, very sorry and said he would replace it first thing in the morning…. Yes honey, it is an elephant’s head but I want you to know you’re very special, and we love you very, very much.”
I enjoy reading and telling mythological stories to my children. They’re colorful as stories and resonate with layers upon layers of symbolic meaning.
And I find them reassuring and empowering as a parent. I’ve been known to lose my temper and am glad I don’t have a third eye because I would have caused some serious, regrettable damage with it. But compared to Shiva, I’m not doing too badly in the parenting department.
What a wonderful luxury! Our legends provide provide us with the delicious paradox of being able to venerate our gods and goddesses and still being able to notch higher behavior points than some of them. Look at all those gods and goddesses and heroes and the messes they got themselves in and out of. Most of them had such dysfunctional families and complicated lives, yet they all turned out happy and fine and interesting and mostly put together. And people in India have had the scoop on their shenanigans for thousands of years and still worship them.
Look at Krishna. How dissipated and lost he might be in today’s world, although he did just fine in his time. You can imagine a therapist giving him a dressing down: “I know you’re struggling to overcome the trauma of being a foster child. You are addicted to dairy products. Eating so much butter since childhood places you in a high-risk category for heart attacks. You have a history of stalking women. The court order obtained by the gopis states that you must maintain a minimum distance of 50 yards between yourself and them, yet you consistently violate it. And your neighbors complain you play the flute loudly at all odd hours. How can you expect people to continue worshipping you if you exhibit such poor self-control and continue to flout the law?”
A culture that is not afraid to vest its gods with frailties and can see beyond their imperfections and worship them despite their flaws century after century has to be both blind and andar-se strong.
Our gods stuff themselves with laddoos till they burst, chase women, bend rules when they want to. They are extensions of ourselves, but with divine powers. They are our superheroes.
America has Superman and Batman and Captain America and hosts of superheroes dashing about in capes. We have our gods and goddesses. That is why a copycat modern superhero like the flabby Shaktiman in his wrinkled nylon bodysuit is a dud who will never capture our imaginations in the same way.
Our flawed, carbo-loading, multi-armed, third-eye incinerating superheroes rule our imaginations. That is why we haven’t tired of hearing and re-telling their stories for 5,000 years, and my children will pass them on to theirs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
