Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Recently, my wife told our soon-to-be-7 daughter that she’d celebrate her own birthday by staying in a hotel. No work, no interruptions, yes to room service, and (pointedly) without my daughter around . My daughter called her bluff immediately, “I don’t need to get nervous. You’d never do that”. Another time my wife was talking to her friend who was building a 5 bedroom house (in the US). Instantly the kid interrupted, “Can you arrange for my birthday to be held at a villa with my friends?” Wow! So she can associate a 5 bedroom with a villa? Guess why my daughter forced us to get her a new cycle recently? Turns out the old one was too childish (all pink), and it had a backseat which allowed her friends to hop on whenever they wanted (uninvited). #*$%!, the sneaky freeloaders who also made her lose balance at times. The new bike is a very functional looking white with no backseat . All of which proves that she’s not a baby anymore. In fact, she is now offended if she’s ca...

There’s this book, Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? , on simple answers to great questions kids ask. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot had this answer to an 8-year-old's question about why we don't have memories from the time we were babies and toddlers: “We use our brain for memory. In the first few years of our lives, our brain grows and changes a lot, just like the rest of our body. Scientists think that because the parts of our brain that are important for memory have not fully developed when we are babies, we are unable to store memories in the same way that we do when we are older. Also, when we are very young we do not know how to speak. This makes it difficult to keep events in your mind and remember them later, because we use language to remember what happened in the past.” I tend to both agree and disagree with the first part of the answer. On the one hand, babies learn very fast. How can they do that if they have no way to “store” data and associations? On the ot...

“The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.” -          Maria Montessori, developer of the Montessori educational system Maria Montessori was born in 1870 and died in 1952. Keep those dates in mind and re-read the quote at the top of the blog. Done? Ok. Now answer this: do you think Montessori would be turning in her grave to learn that developers who write baby and toddler apps for smartphones and iPads quote her lines to ennoble the touchscreen age?!  (I realized my 20 month young daughter expects everything to be touch enabled when she swiped PC monitors and expected a response!). So many apps on the iPad that my daughter plays with are interactive: fairy tales have options to dress the princess...with matching shoes and a tiara to boot (not that she understands any of it). She could paint the scenery (which she can’t, so my wife and I do it…happily) or do puzzles as she goes through the fairy tale. Welcome to the ...

The recent surge of interest in Sherlock Holmes (seen via recent books and movies ) reminded me of my own memories about the star detective. When the TV series came on Doordarshan I was too young to understand any of it. Later when I was older, my dad bought me the entire Holmes collection. Even though half the stories had references to all kinds of ancient British terms that made no sense to me, I read on. The idea that people the victims knew (like their step-father) could put on a wig and some makeup and yet fool them completely seemed very far-fetched (note that such great makeup was a recurring theme in many of the stories) but I thought, hey, if everyone else who read the books considered it believable, maybe makeup could be that good. Looking back, I think back then I was like the crowd in that fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes, you know one of those guys who just like whatever it is that is acclaimed! Or to quote the wise Calvin who told Hobbes, “You know how peopl...

I remember this part in one of Richard Dawkins’ books where he tried to answer the question as to how gradual evolution can give any survival advantage. Citing the evolution of the eye, someone had asked him what good is a partial eye? Doesn’t it have to be a fully functioning eye or nothing at all? Why would evolution favour a partial eye? Dawkins went on to answer that by stating that a 2% eye is better than no eye (blindness), and a 4% eye is better than a 2% (even a slightly better chance of spotting the prey or predator can make all the difference when it comes to survival) and so on all the way to 100%. I just got another example from a totally different domain recently. My 6 month old baby can roll over and swivel a bit. I was getting impatient and wondering when she would make some progress beyond that. I got my answer when my wife visited a friend with a baby that was a month younger than ours. That baby (being younger) could not yet roll over. So our heroine, when placed ne...

When a baby arrives, the new parents get a lot of help and advice. Some of that advice is wanted, others not so much; some good, others bad; some wise, others funny. As with all advice, some you can ignore safely, others you ignore at your risk. We had a lot of trouble burping the baby. My mother-in-law seemed to be able to do it effortlessly, but she couldn't teach us how. So we tried the Internet, first via articles, and when that didn't work, via a YouTube video with a woman in a German dress. And bingo! Turns out one should hit (trust me, “hit” is the right word) the baby quite hard, not pat it gently the way we were doing. My wife now says we learnt how to burp a baby from a German lady. Go globalization! Turns out a baby is far more resilient than we imagined. Like how hot the water in which you bathe her. It can be really hot, way above the temperature at which we adults would bathe, as my mom showed us. But the baby has no problems at all bathing in the (what ...

Everyone tells you how a baby changes everything. It’s hard to imagine how much until one actually arrives. You also don’t realize how much your patience can increase until the baby comes. As a kid, I used to wonder how my parents seemed to be OK to watch parts of anything on TV whereas we kids felt the world would end if we missed a minute of anything. Now I know: a baby would have changed their normal viewing to a point where they no longer expect to be able to see anything continuously! We’d wanted to see Mission Impossible 4 the weekend the baby arrived. Now we don’t know when we’ll see our next movie in a theater. Same for eating out. An uninterrupted night’s sleep is now a distant memory. The occasional puke and spit on your clothes is to be expected. Midnight feeds are now a part of life. But a baby (girl) also teaches you a lot about women. Like why women can’t communicate clearly. Now I know: a baby girl has a single sound for everything: crying. And that’s when...