“Jispa, I hate you combing hair in the car. Your hair are
all over and then you don’t collect them and throw them properly. When you
throw them out they fly back in. Take your hair and roll them up before you
dispose them”
“ok, ok, I am doing that”
“you know my grandmother would comb her hair, roll them in a
circle and then before disposing them put the bunch in a folded paper”
“why would you do that?”
“she did that so that the hair don’t get stuck in a little
bird’s legs. She was all jain”
“oh, all Jain and all… Hmm.. Why are we not Jain?”
“you are Jain. We are Jain. You were born a Jain”
“no seriously, why are we not Jain, really. Why don’t we practice
and all”
“ah. Jasmine and I were religious at one time. Not too much,
but we did believe in God and we did go to temples and pray. But then once when
we were in Haridwar..”
“there is a story to this as well? There is a story to why
we do not follow Jainism”
“oh ya. There is story to that as well”
I have written about this story before. I explained to her
the story of how we turned completely non-religious and it was thanks to her. In
short when once we were in haridwar and the dam hotel guide happened to be a
pujari who made us chant a few mantras before releasing lamp into the river. Jasmine and I did not
bother too much but we saw Jispa repeating like it was important. That day, I
told her, that day I took a decision that “you may learn to pray form you grandmother
or anyone, but you will not learn to pray from me”.
Yes Jispa, almost everything has a story to it. A lot of
what we do is dictated by our interactions with you. A lot of it willingly and
a lot of it unwittingly. I don’t we have complains but its true, parenting
shaped us much more than we anticipated.
Finally! Jispa and I went to see a movie with each other. I
waited 13 years for this day. She is finally into action movies and Jasmine
gets tortured watching these thaka thaki movies with no head or tail. Jispa and
I went for the X Men Apocalypse yesterday. Quite a sad movie it was. My view is
that 13 year old kids are happy with all the special effects and the action heroes
doing all kinds of mind bending tricks but nothing can work with an absent
story line. It was an ok movie but just going with Jispa for it was well worth
the experience. We have stayed next to the IMAX theatre for 10 years now but
finally we are enjoying the proximity. The Imax screen does allow for a lovely
3D experience with bright screens and a large format with great sound. It is
quite an awesome thing to be staying next to!
When we thought of parenting we hadn’t bargained for all
this. We knew it would be fun and that it would change us in a definite sort of
way but we did not really know the large consequences of our small action.
This is chaos theory in full action. Chaos Theory or the butterfly
effect is basically a theory that explains that small differences in the initial
conditions can have large, profound impact with almost unimaginable results. I
think parenting is just like that. It is chaos theory in full effect, where you
can see it in full action. For Jispa’s upbringing joining Matunga Gymkhana for
us was a chaos theory in action. I remember convincing Jasmine to join the
Gymkhana. We had a little extra money and the memberships were available. So we
joined it and for a year we did not even do much with it. But then we got to the
gymkhana and did a tour of the various sports facilities and met the coaches
involved. We thought she should play some sport and zeroed in on badminton as
the sport she should play. The timings or something matched well. Then we
thought that she also might as well learn swimming as that is a life skill. ‘She
should at least learn swimming’. This small change in initial conditions
changed our life in a way that we could think possible. Now we have a Mumbai
champion in the house. We wake up, do our shit and learnt so much about
ourselves in the process. Wow. Who would have thought.
Going to the evening aarti at haridwar was a small decision
we took and it changed our views on religion in a way that impacted our
thinking and possibly impacted Jispa’s religious thought forever. From an
atheist mindset, who knows what leap she shall take!
Such is life. Small changes in initial conditions take on a
life of their own. They bring about changes in your life that you are
completely unable to think through. So why do we even bother about big
decisions in our life. These big decisions are most of the time not too smart
and in any case we cant really figure out the consequences of what we do.
Smaller decisions, like who are friends are, what books we read, whom we talk
to, what we experience and what all we want to do, shape us in many ways that
we think impossible. I think the simple rule is – try something new. As long as
you have exposure to multiple things you have a chance to grow from it.
Exposure is the key to it. You have to keep trying in an effort for the chaos
theory to take shape. You have to keep making small small initial changes to
the conditions you see around you. These will have massive impacts in your
life. Not having them is a real problem, because then you don’t have a chance
to break through and create systems that are beneficial for you in the long
run.
Reading and understanding Physics has contributed more to my
understanding of Life and Marketing than
anything else. It is a beautiful science where at some basic level, the new
science in physics, especially quantum physics is telling you that - you really
don’t know anything for sure. It’s nothing but a chance and you have to give it
enough chance to succeed. In my understanding the nuclear bomb design is also
the same thing, at some level.
The theory was summarized by Edward Lorenz as: Chaos:
When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not
approximately determine the future.
So there you are in simple words, the wisdom of life. Read it,
understand it and know it that you don’t know anything in life!
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