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"Let's thank the Gruffalo with a Christmas drink"






If you grow up to be an actor or a stage performer, you could tell everyone this gruffalo line was your first ever line on stage!
"That was yesterday, when I was a baby! " is how I imagine you would narrate it, for that's how you say it now. For you,  anytime in the past is yesterday, every past age / stage is "baby''.

Going back to your performance, when I say that was your first line on a stage, In the spirit of full disclosure, it wasn't a real stage. Your play school had arranged for what could best be described as a makeshift stage by hanging a few sheets in a hall and decorating it with Christmas tinsel and assorted decorations. Also, when I say your first line, I meant it was the only line you had. And just so I'm totally honest, these were not really the first words you actually uttered on stage. Those first words are yet to come. On this occasion although you were dressed like a mouse, you were more like a deer caught in the lights of an approaching car. Scared and intimidated by the roomful of parents in attendance at your preschool. Or may be you were more like a koala - a cute little bundled up furry ball of shyness!

But I was glad. Most of the parents around me were glad, although we were on roughly the same boat of anxious little children that needed all the encouragement to do what they otherwise did so well - have fun and make some noise. 
Let me describe the overall performance this way - if there is a future super star actor in your batch, demonstrating skills at an age between 3-4, he or she wasn't discovered during this performance. Nevertheless, most of us parents were still smiling and cheering. 
We were happy, for one, to be there and secondly for each one of you to be there, giving your first shot at a public performance, expanding or at least testing your comfort zone. And also for our kids not being like that poor fellow wailing in the corner or the other one lying in his dad's arms. Having said that, your friend Melody did kind of shine during the Christmas carols, with all those thumping fists and a singing voice three times her size.

Dear daughter
Looking at your life in hindsight is a funny thing. With that proverbial 20x20 vision, you end up judging your actions and decisions in a completely different perspective, being a very different person in present. Fact is, on any given today, everyone "was a baby yesterday" as you'd say. Every second and minute, we grow in innumerable ways, making us an older and different us. While it might be useful to reminisce and draw lessons from the mistakes we made in the past, there is no real benefit in judging ourselves for mistakes of past. In the grand scheme of a lifetime, we were babies then, unarmed with the wisdom and experience we would have accumulated since then.
However, at times it is very useful to think ahead and see how a decision we make today might look to us in the future. 
Your mum's, daadi's and mine decision to somehow, anyhow, make it to your first performance was one such decision- perfect in present tense and perfect with the lenses of a future hindsight.

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