Flying hearts and the Aero Show

When the children’s exams gets over, a sense relief surrounds the whole family. Parents sigh of relief is as if they also have just completed their exams. The quantity and the size of books these days children read is frightening.

Since today was the day of A and S’s freedom from exams, they had `ordered’ me to take them to Aero Show. May be their hearts and minds also wanted to soar in the sky like the metal birds.

S and A enjoying the Show

It was 2.40 in the afternoon when we reached the spot and the show had just begun.

I was amazed at the S’s knowledge of the jets and fighter planes and he helped me to identify them.

The show was fantastic.

`Suryakirans’ performance at the end of the show was astounding.

They formed a `heart’ in mid air and vanished.

What children Teach Us

Recently I read book which I had purchased in Bangalore Book Fair- `What Our Children Teach Us` by Piero Ferucci. It is a fascinating book.



The author is a psychologist and incidentally I am also interested in psychology since my college days. I have written a book on dreams and another on sexual psychology. I wrote an article about why children cry. It was through a psychological perspective. I had a lot of theories about children, their upbringing, their thoughts etc. etc. Well that was all before my marriage and before I had children of my own! After my children were born, my theories were humbled and my theories were gone with the wind!
And now, about the book- the author says,
`Living with our children allows us to grow. I am convinced that this is so for everyone. With children we have the opportunity to cultivate patience and humour, deepen the intelligence of the heart, learn to find hidden richness in ordinary life, find unexpected happiness.
`Nevertheless, this transformation is not always painless. Alongside moments of joy there are also challenging trials, in which our weaknesses, our lies and hyprocrisies, our doubts and contradictions, our shortcoming, are all brought under the most pitiless light. And yet this is how change often happens.
`Like every parent, I have been stung, squeezed out, wounded, reprogrammed, turned inside out, never let off the hook. How often have my children, with a diabolical instinct, touched those weak points, I kept carefully concealed! These episodes have transformed me. In a hard and painful way, they have made me different from the person I was before, like no course of psychotherapy, no spiritual retreat, no meeting with an Oriental guru could have done.`
I close this small post with an anecdote of my own. I have also written this in the Introduction of my Kannada book `Neenemba Naanu’. When my son was seven years old and while watching a TV programme where a dead was burnt on pyre, he asked why they do it. I explained him about life and death and after death why they burn or bury the deceased. I also told him that every living organism ultimately has to go back to soil. I told him philosophically that we all come from soil and ultimately we go back to soil. He attentively listened my lecture. I was watching his face for any expressions. He thought for a while, then asked, `You tell that we all come from soil and go back to soil. But why do you scold me when I play in soil?`
Frankly, I had no answer.

Hindu God and Muslim God

Few days back I read in news papers that two Kashmiri Muslim Youth were arrested in North Karnataka while doing ‘namaz’ in a Hindu `Temple’. I do not know anything about about their intentions. Probably people and police thought they were desecrating the Hindu temple.

I remembered a news clipping I had read in a English weekly a year back. That particular reporter had gone to Kashmir and while he was returning to Srinagar in a taxi, that taxi driver, a Muslim, asked the reporter whether he wished to visit the Sun Temple. It was evening and the reporter said ‘yes’. It was a beautiful temple. While the reporter was going around the temple he saw two Muslims doing namaz in the precincts of the temple. He was surprised to see that and out of curiosity he asked them being Muslims were they not offended to pray in a Hindu temple? They questioned him back with a smile, `Why, don’t you know, that the God is one irrespective of religion?’.