The joy of becoming irrelevant

As a children’s author, I often get asked questions about parenting. Writing for that audience, however, does not make me an expert on children because most times, I’m writing for the child that I used to be. I do have a child but I don’t have any great insight on what to do with other people’s children. My parenting philosophy is to slowly embrace my increasing irrelevance in her world and eventually reach a state of mutual liberation where we don’t need each other but choose to keep in touch nevertheless (that’s the hope).

There used to be a time when I thought that my job was to teach my daughter the difference between good and bad, virtue and vice. Nowadays, I just pray that I don’t bulldoze into the person that she is and ruin everything. The older I grow, the more I realise that parenting is actually about acceptance; or at the very least, keeping your mouth shut because you really don’t know any better. Once, when I was in the middle of giving my daughter some unsolicited advice (is there any other kind?), she told me, “Oh, you are talking like a person from another century. And you, in fact, are.”

That’s certainly true. I was born in the 1980s. I have watched Doordarshan. I have seen a rotary telephone. I have used a dial-up internet connection. I was on Orkut. I have had a pager. I have sung ‘I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world’. It’s tempting to list these as qualifications for offering advice, but there is nothing remarkable about any of these. Everything and everybody grows old; the only achievement is, really, that you’ve managed to stay alive.

It’s not very flattering to be told that you sound like you’re from the last century. But I was vastly amused. Parenting is so hard that if babies came with a ‘refund’ sticker on their bums, most sane adults would return them to the hypothetical baby shop from where they got them. Since they don’t, parents eventually make their peace with this permanent thunderstorm that has visited their lives. For me, parenting remains rewarding for the truth bombs that my daughter keeps dropping. I’d never thought of myself as an outdated, last century dinosaur (I thought those were my parents), but after she said that, it was quite pleasant to recognise my identity for what it was.

We still haven’t reached a stage when the expressions and references she uses are lost on me. I remember how puzzled my father used to be when I said things like, “It’s taking ages!” He couldn’t imagine how a 20-minute wait could be termed “ages”. I used to be amazed that he didn’t know who Kareena Kapoor was or anyone else in the cricket team other than Sachin Tendulkar. He sang only MGR songs and didn’t know any Ilaiyaraaja or AR Rahman songs. Imagine.

I still understand most things my daughter says, and she’s yet to discover noisy music bands or weird dishes I’ve never heard of (my mother has been asking me what a lasagna is for several years now, but she can’t bring herself to order it because she’s terrified that it will be inedible). But that phase will come soon, and I’m looking forward to it. I’d like my eyes to glaze over as she talks about everything that’s BIG and URGENT in her world, and enjoy my irrelevance in the larger scheme of things.

Old people, in general, like to feel like they’re still important and that the world can’t run without them. The truth is that the world can pretty much run without anyone, not just old people. The difference is that young people are so self-involved that the thought never occurs to them that they’re irrelevant. Old people, on the other hand, have sensed it and they are fiercely in denial about it. So, they tell the young how to run their lives. They grab the mic in colony association meetings and don’t stop talking. They do yoga and tell everyone that they should also do yoga. They want to self-publish their autobiography. They want the chief guest’s chair. They want to be seen. They want to be acknowledged. They want to be relevant.

Middle-aged people are caught in between. They don’t see themselves as irrelevant yet and they work extremely hard to keep it that way. They dress like the young. They follow all the young people trends. They resent being called ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’. They run marathons. They eat low fat yogurt. They want to prolong their relevance for as long as possible.

But irrelevance is like that invisibility cloak that you always wanted as a child. What if nobody could see you but you could see everyone and everything? Become a quiet observer who isn’t expected to intervene for every small thing? Ah, the relief! There’s so much about the world that I wouldn’t be expected to know simply because people would assume that it would be beyond me. Who is in the latest Rajamouli spectacle that made Rs 3000 crore at the box-office? What a joy it would be to look vague and say, “But who is Rajamouli?”

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was vital for her existence. After she was born, I was still vital for a few years, functioning as a dairy cow and fiercely protective tiger mom in the playground. But as she grows older, I would like to become vestigial. Just a part of her that’s there but is useless. I would like to be an appendix. And if I cause her pain, I hope she will have the sense to have me removed.