About Kids...

Kids…I love them. But I think it’s just convenient to say I like kids when they are other people’s kids.

No…I am sure, people who have their own kids are happy to have them, but I feel having a kid is a huge responsibility or as Db would like to put it…the ROI (Return on Investment) is very bad.

I do want to have my own kids at some point in life (donno when though), but I am not sure if I can handle the responsibility it comes with. But there are times when I look at other people and feel that I could have done a thousand times better than them. As I told Db the same day, it’s been a while that I met a kid whom I found sweet.

We went for one of Db’s nephew’s 5th b’day party this week. Now, I come from a nuclear family, I have never got to seen so many kids together. Here there were too many kids, most of them seemed to have both working parents.
Now, I believe there is a very thin line between pampered and spoilt, mischievous and ill mannered. Like I feel, I am a pampered kid but I was never spoilt, mischievous but not ill mannered. I remember Bhai and me to be quite well behaved as kids.

These kids were spoilt to the extent that they refuse to speak Hindi or Oriya even with the elderly people in the family, yell at the guests whom they have never seen before ‘Ae…you get out of that sofa, I have no place to sit!!!’…while their parents watch and smile in silence ‘Awwwww my baby is cho chweet!!!’
The kids had all kinda firang names, who believe that speaking, yelling and swearing in English is kool. They refuse to listen to their own parents. Now, what will they grow up to…a confused generation, who would probably have an identity crisis.

I mean...I have nothing against speaking English or beahaving like firangs, but I have a problem when they say ‘I don’t speak my mother tongue’. Even my Oriya is not great, I was brought up in Rourkela, which had a more cosmopolitan culture, and also Oriya was not mandatory in our school then. We got to speak our mother tongue only at home, or within the family and relatives. Despite of the fact that my father is a renowned writer in Oriya literature, me and Bhai have only got a descent knowledge in Oriya. But that is not something we are proud of, nor are we shy to speak in our mother tongue. That kinda shows your upbringing.

I really don’t wanna have a kid and bring him up this way, so that he grows up to a confused individual, and unable to identify himself among any group, American or Indian. I want to bring him up so that he/she can adjust himself in any group, with family he can be as pleasant and charming...mischevous okay but not ill mannered, and yet can be at par with the kind of friends he mingles with.