Turn OFF the SWITCHES when you leave the room.

Turn OFF the SWITCHES when you leave the room.  

"Turn OFF the SWITCHES when you leave the room. ". This statement haunts me all the time whenever I leave a room, any room.   

In my father's polite voice -- all the time, every time.  

It used to irritate me to no end.  It irritates me to no end. 

When he was there and now that he is not there.  

What's the big fuss about this statement.  

This statement probably rings true in probably every Indian household of kids born in the 60s 70s and the 80s We all live with it.  We all learn to live with it. 

For someone who did his school homework in a room illuminated by a kerosene lamp, I was not brought up in times of electricity surplus which Calcutta is used to now.  Electricity was a luxury no matter how rich you were in the 70s or even in 00s.   

I thought I would outgrow it with time as the years passed by but I did not.  It's so very ingrained into the mind and the mind set that it will probably die only after my death.  

Following the instruction was not a choice.  When did we really have a choice with our parents whether it was about the choice of vegetables or the clothes that came home.   Ok that's an exaggeration from my side but electrical switches no choice.  Turn off the switch. Do not simply turn off the appliance or the equipment from the remote.  

Turn off the switch.  

So when God yanked the plug out of my dad's power socket,  apart from the pain that would never leave us, along with the fond memories that would never leave us. I thought,  I would never hear or  get to hear his voice every time I would leave a room.  

I was so wrong.  I always heard it. 

It was god damn irritating. 

So I thought, I would simply leave the switches on.  I never turn off the switches when I am at home.   I like to say it's Diwali everyday at home.  All rooms to have the lights on. Every room I enter after coming home.  I turn on the switch and I leave. 

I always use the remote to turn off the television. 

The AC power is always on. 

The microwave is always on.  

The led display always running the scroll  WELCOME TO MICROWAVE COOKING.  It's been 7 years the switch has never been turned off.  I think Panasonic would be proud of their product.  Even they would not have a clue of the hardiness of the product they made for India sitting in Japan.  They surely did a good job.  

The extension chord is always powered on.  Screw the risk. 

Anybody turning lights off before sleep time faces my wrath.  

I just don't turn off the switch at home.  --  I want to hear that voice one more time  HIMANSHU turn off the god damn switch.   But I know it will never follow me.  I want to get rid of that voice and statement in my head.  

It does cost money to run all the lights and there is plenty of statistics available to read about the amount of electricity wasted by keeping electrical appliances on sleep mode and not turning the power OFF.  When I was in GE, they could track PC with their monitor in sleep mode across the length and breath of the country sitting in Gurgaon and issue warning memos.    It's just about how passionate you are about driving yourself.   

My approach towards my wasteful behaviour was never appreciated by my wife and that I was  setting a bad example for my child.   Despite being an exemplary example of patience and virtue on most parameters, most of the time.  

I failed miserably when it came to electrical switches.   

I refused to call out after my son - "Turn off the switch. " or " Turn off the lights " or 

like my wife goes " arjun bathroom Ki light khuli kyon hai.   "

Well that's her prerogative if she wants to haunt her son.

I restrict my self to the basic instruction of please turn off the air conditioner in the bathroom or please turn off the air conditioner in the living room.  Now this basically simply means please close the bathroom door and the door that leads to the living room from the bedroom. 

Things change, people change, attitudes change, approach changes, beliefs change, belief systems change, the things that haunt  you change. Everything has a trigger,  triggers are identified only in hindsight, never does realisation dawn upon you instantaneously.  

2016

I happened to visit a childhood friend and stayed with him and his family for 3 or 4 days at  a stretch several times    In close continuation over a period of 3 months,  so that's like 12 days or so in winter and spring.  

Now you are not artificial with your childhood friends and nor are you pretentious. You are yourself and they are themselves.  

Like I said I am not habituated to turning off the lights when I leave the room unless I am about to leave the house.   Well that's the way I am.  While I am conscious about leaving the room and the bed and bedsheets and duvet cover the washroom and bathroom and other things in perfect order that no one ever has to clean up or tidy up after me.  Like the lady of the house expressed  " Its like the room was never used. "  

But light. That's another story.  I step out of the bedroom to eat my breakfast.  Come back to a room that has its lights out.  Hey I did not do that.  I step out of the living room to get some water from the kitchen spend ten minutes in the kitchen chatting and come back to the empty living room  with the lights out.  Hey I did not do that.   It's like magic wherever I leave and go and comeback the lights are turned off by magic and its not like I was away for long.  

I am an observant person by nature without any reason or any additional effort from inside.  It's instinct.  

I realised my friend and his son were the culprit to my discomfort. However they were like magicians.  Lights turning off as in offices that are motion sensor controlled.   You walk in, the lights turn on.  You walk out the lights turn off, behind you.  In my office if you sit "still" for too long even the light directly above you turns off and you are left to the illumination of the laptop screen.  Now all this happens in the office to save electricity and its expenses.  I will not dwell upon it here.   

Coming back to my friend's home and the magician and 5 year old elf at work.  

I figured out that all the illumination was with LED bulbs and a few CFLs, Now considering that this was a four  year old house and the average actual age of a CFL is around 7 years which is not really a recording of date to date or any marketing gimmick statistics.   It's simply the age of my Son and the time when we actually bought our first CFL which the shopkeeper used to mark on the body to note the one year guarantee. Well those CFLs bought then are dying now.     

The primary illumination in our house remains tube-light not for any other reason other than the fact that my wife and I love the cool daylight white light, but that is another story on preferences on the kind of lighting we like, love or hate.  

So this 2 storied house with 5 bedrooms and the living and the dinning and kitchen and pantry and all the trappings of the good life  Is completely illuminated by LED.  

Having figured out the modus operandi of the magician and the elf for arguments sake I brought up the topic of our parents habits coming into ourselves and how switching off the switch was a touchy subject from childhood.  Well as it turns out it was for him too.  But he never uttered those haunting words to his child.  He just led by example.  He turned off the lights when he left a room. He never asked anyone to do it in case anyone left it turned on. He simply went and turned it off.  Kids follow best by example.   The kid picked it up in no time as soon as he was tall enough for his fingers to reach the switch board, he was his father's replica as a light turning off machine.   

For further arguments sake I said dude that's a lot of money invested in LEDs that consume very little electricity so it does not really make any sense to turn it on and off every time you enter or leave a room.  The electricity saved is negligible and given the subsequent monetary saving also being negligible, why indulge in the entire activity of ON and OFF when there is no bloody saving worth even a packet of Tata salt.  That's the funny part.  

His response was pretty simple and it quite reopened my father's haunting statement In my mind.  I always heard the statement , I never heard where it was coming from.  

It's not about saving.  It's about not wasting.  ITS ABOUT NOT WASTING. Spending money to save money is for idiots.  It's about not wasting electricity.   The electricity that I save is used somewhere else.  That someone might be a city slicker or a man in the village I don't know.  What I do know and I live with happily is knowing that  I did not waste electricity.  

Of this, now, I am sure that it was not about saving money by not wasting electricity for my father too.  Had it been so he would have saved his own life by not wasting away his lungs.  

Well the lungs were his own. The electricity was a common society's resource not to be wasted just because you could afford to waste it.  

I have been meaning to write this for a very long time ever since I came back home from my friend's house but never got around to it despite having thanked him for enlightening me on such a basic life transforming activity.   It's not everyday that you discover that something does not haunt you any more.  There are somethings that you can't thank people enough for, but that does not mean that you don't say the magic words.  

All my wasteful years of indulgence and kinks of creature comforts and doing your own thing which includes having a friend who used to call up home to request someone to turn on the aircon when he was 13km away so that he could walk into a perfectly cooled room when the temperature outside was 40 degree plus.   It was not wasteful behaviour.  It was just indulgence in self gratification after spending time in the scorching sun and the snow blizzard in sub zero temperatures with equal élan to earn a living, without ever complaining.  Man I have earned it.  But even for him I guess as he became a father he was setting out the right example.   

We are our own self for a short period of time in life sometimes that phase may be a bit longer from the time we actually step out of our parents shadows to the time we actually become parents ourselves.  We automatically try to become the perfect examples for our children which is like saying that we become somewhat a replica of our own parents in more ways than one.   

PS. This note is dedicated to Vishal and his awesome wife Priya along with his 5 year son Aviral.     

Every thing has its own time in our life       Like this fridge magnet.   

Every CFL and LED switched off counts.   

Picture attached.  

I will switch off for India.  Will you ?  

Somethings have a calling like this electricity thing. It's bombarding you from all sides.   

You just have to connect.  

Which brings me to the movie "karate kid." Where Will Smith's son goes to live in China with his mom.  

The hot water is not working.  

Jackie Chan, the maintenance guy comes and says all perfect. Flip switch off.  Turn on for hot water. Turn off after using.  How does it work in your country ?  

Drey says : "We don't have no switch in America." 

Jackie Chan says : "It's Time to have one."  🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Cave in.

The first time I let my mind cave in.  

I remember the day, I first gave in to my mind that I can't do it.  

The walk was up Rishikesh to some water fall.  

2010 Good Friday, it was. 

I decided for myself.  

To suffer Pain and panting and running out of breath was not for me.   

I imagined : I could not carry the burden of my 3 year old son and my own weight.   I could probably drag myself but I could not drag the little one. I did not believe in myself. So I actually did not trust myself to physically endure the pain. 

Kind of strange because  I had my wife with me.  I had friends younger than me with a kid younger than mine and they were carrying the load without a thought.  They had a destination and the view of a waterfall in mind while I had my unexperienced  laboured breath like never before on mine.   I was 37.   

We could have shared the load but that thought never crossed my mind.

We all carry our own cross don't we.  No one shares our cross for us.   

I was less than human enough to accept that I could not do it upfront.

Accepting your weakness to yourself is pretty easy.  It's just a thought.  

Accepting and admitting and voicing it and sharing it with your friends and family is a tough one.  

Telling your friends that you can't do it.  

Telling your wife : sorry, can't walk further, just can't do it.  I am turning back.   

How to say it ? choosing the words was difficult.  

I don't really recall what exactly I said to them at that point of time. 

Come to think of it - I was leading the way as always.  Arjun and I were way ahead of everyone else on that lonely mountain trail, the others following us slowly.  But I just could not imagine carrying on further even if it meant being a spoil sport.  

Maybe it was staying in the lead alone with my own son and carrying him for sometime when he could not walk further. Maybe talking to myself is not a such a great idea for I have not been there and done that.   But my mind caved in.  It was not like I was saying that I don't want to climb the Mount Everest at the base camp itself.  I was saying, that I don't want to endure the huffing and panting to see a waterfall.  Maybe I was not motivated enough.  Whatever it be ; most personal battles are lost and won In the mind.  

I had thought there would be some sort of protest and egging on and motivating speeches of the type "come on man lets do it" and I had mentally thought of lots of things to say to get out of the trek, and that you guys carry on while I head back. 

For me the walk back to the hotel itself seemed like a walk back to the house on the moon and I was more worried about even surviving the downhill path back. 

But as my wife and my friends caught up with Arjun and me and I said the unthinkable. " I am turning back. " Other than a token suggestion of let's try and catch our breath for sometime and then think if we want to carry on further from everyone.  There was no protest in turning back after spending some time together in silence in the wilderness.  

5 adults and 2 toddlers in arms turned back because of one weak link - that was my mind.  

They say that  pain is temporary. The feeling of winning over pain is permanent.  We could have seen the waterfall that day and come back safe and sound and lived happily ever after.  

The reverse is also true, pain is temporary, the feeling of losing to pain is permanent.   

That 6 years down the line I write about that moment In time and I relive that moment is proof enough.  

That 5 years later I followed some one blindly over probably a longer trek practically vertically uphill with no particular trail for more than an hour and a half. 

Just when I was starting on my medication for regulating blood pressure and having a history of high altitude sickness. 

I was the slow walker. I was the follower.  I was not the leader. I did not really have to shoulder the responsibility of carrying Arjun  to the destination.  Arjun was 8 and  had more than 10 times the spring in his steps than mine.  But that's another story for another day.  

It even crossed my mind what if we have a heart attack and die here  ? I imagined that We could die of a heart attack in the car stuck in a traffic jam few hundred meters from the hospital  in the city and no one would still be able to do anything at all.  

And I laboured on :  the summers of 2015.  

There is no memory of turning back and what could have been, no memory of being a lesser human being in the eyes of my son.  Just an acceptance that I can follow slowly in his footsteps.    

PS.  This one is dedicated to Niraj and Shalini Sharma for carrying me all the way uphill and downhill and being an inspiration all the way for the rest of my lifetime.  

Sunday Daddy.

It's very easy to be a Sunday daddy. 

I know exactly what prompted me to this conclusion.  

I was a single parent child for most part of my life and my father had certain expectations from me in terms of the love and affection and attention that I was to shower upon him.  To that extent I was clear I had no such expectations from my offspring.  

The one big expectation that I had of my son was for him to be happy with himself and not be disobedient towards his parents.  

There is a big difference between obedient and disobedient.  

He is a happy kid.  

The happiness overflows.

It's infectious.  

But only a parent can understand that when a kid is happy it often is at the expense of his own interest of the future and needless to say also at the expense of the parent's peace of mind.  

The kid lives in the moment and for the moment. There is no tomorrow.  Make the most of NOW.   Seize the day is what the kid  believes in, without knowing what it means.  

I, me, myself and my happiness comes naturally. The people surrounding the kid are but mere resources to use.  Parents are but resources to extract from - what the child wants. 

There is no guilt attached to the expense attached to the happiness.  Life is mostly self centred and rightly so.  

And like one of my supervisors at work had taught me repeatedly, if you want the resources from the management :   "The child who does not cry does not get what he wants."   I still refuse to cry knowing fully well it's stupid of me.  

Well my son also does not cry.  He does not pester you.  He simply defeats your steely resolve by his happy smile and dissolves your resolution by simply badgering you by talking about what he wants by turning any conversation back to his subject of Interest indirectly.  It's the gift of the gab. If you engage in the conversation that's the end of it for you, he has fun. After all "baat karne SE hi toh baat Banti hai. ". You  can't really defeat or kill  a child's enthusiasm. You are not so cruel. Well I am not so cruel. Till 8 years of his age I can't recall a single incident where in he has gone wailing away or rolled on the floor anywhere  or in a shop when he has not got what he has wanted.  

Yes he has sulked and gone into his shell and he has hidden his face in the pillows on the bed, refusing to talk to you but he has never said that you are bad or that you are the worst father on this earth and that I hate you and all the Jazz and melodrama of theatrics that most normal kids do.  I assume he is a normal kid because he has said all the possible spiteful statements that regular kids do but all of them are addressed to the mother.  Never to the father.  I have seen him at his worst behaviour but all of this has been brought out by the mother. Never by me.  Or so I like to believe. 

I have always believed that towing your parent's line till a certain age of maturity is attained by the child is absolutely essential and non comprisable.  

That the mother bears the brunt of all the hatred of a child is simply because of the fact that she is the one who spends the maximum time with the kid and ALLOWS the father to be the good parent when he comes back home after work and the preconditioning of the child has been done over the years that dad comes back home after a hard day's work ( true or not is questionable ) and that be nice and sweet and at your best behaviour in front of dad.  

This drill -- It's kind of funny because most mothers put in an equal amount of hard days work and squeeze in more work per hour and rush home   to attend to the child and home while the father probably chills at work after working hours over a smoke or a beer and then strolls in like the Lord of the house to the image of a doting wife and child.  .........   

Well it's all a set up.  It's a lie.  The pressure cooker environment that the mother and child live in day in and day out with the house hold chores and the demands of work and the ferrying of the child to the activity class and back or organising the car pooling with other mothers, completing the home work and the project and a lot of other things that would fill an entire ream.  

It's funny but there is more logistics involved in running a household with a human child than Blue Dart  and DHL can imagine.   FedEx Is in a different league.

Having spent a considerable amount of time at home behind my wife's back and trying to partially cover her duties as a parent, my perfect doting image as a chilled out father with the perfect chilled out well mannered son has starting to wear out. The nerves are frayed on either side.  After all how long can artificiality last in the long run.  Every one of us has a dark side.  Child or beast. Which ever way we look at it.  It all comes out in due course if two individuals are left alone for a considerable length of time.  

After having being the perfect Sunday daddy I am glad for having being initiated into and being groomed by my wife as the well engaged participative father behind her back. That I fail miserably in both my son and his mother's eyes makes me feel happy because they don't give up on me.  My son says -  don't worry mom does like this and pulls me along.  On the other side my wife let's me figure things out on my own and is appreciative of my minuscule success.  They don't murder me for being more a part of their life suddenly and breaking into their well set lives.  

All said and done, hiding behind the excuse of a hard day's work and clocking 16 hours out of the 4 walls of the house including the last 2 weekends of the month --  it was easy being the sugar sweet Sunday daddy.   But that's a thing of the past.  I am so glad about discovering my real Wife and my real Son in real life and what they were like behind me when I was away at work and I am happy to be able to pitch more into their lives.  

I hope they feel the same way too while this phase of experiencing life lasts.  

This note was written after a day of raving and ranting at my son for 10 minutes of how he goofs up and giving him a piece of my bad side of my tongue and language.  

June 2016.