You are in Reception and the two of us - your mum &I are in it with you. We were reading a book - you & I
and to try and explain the concept of Direct speech, I involved your mum. Here's how it went -
You read - " ‘I will get the cash ‘ he said.”
"What did chip say'' - I asked
"Chip said I will get the cash he said" you repeated by reading it again.
Noticing how you were confused between Chip’s words and the books narration, I wanted to clarify the concept to you a bit more.
"Rheya, when you are just telling what the other person is saying, you don't have to say ‘he said’ at the end." I tried to explain without using complicated words like quotes and direct speech.
"Like if I say Rheya drink your milk" I continued and then turning to your mom I asked -"what did
I say to Rheya?"
"Dad said 'Rheya drink you milk' '' - your mom responded, helpfully - or so we thought!
Taking in your confused look, we repeated the little impromptu performance for your benefit. Somewhere towards the end of the second take, you started laughing - a very bemused & confused expression on your face - "I do not understand the game you are playing. I do not! '' - you declared, your eyebrows raised in wonder, eye wide and glittering like only a child’s does and slowly shaking your head side to side.
Your mom and I, suddenly realising how strange an act we were putting up, started laughing with you, the idea of trying to explain anything going out for a toss !
If this doesn't sound funny enough on reading, we'll put it in that category of you-had-to-be-there-to-get-it funny.
That though defines our general routine now a days, some reading, a few games and some playful studies. Your motivation for reading on most days used to be 'watching'- your term for the activity of watching 'stuff' on either your iPad or the family TV. I haven't tried to correct the term as I don't yet know of a better term. It used to be watching TV but given the mix of devices and content, I guess general term ‘watching’ is as particular as it gets.
You start with watching videos of children and even grown ups playing with dolls on YouTube for kids (you call it the ‘Time Out one’ as I have a time out set on it for you). Surprisingly, for you those videos now take precedence over your erstwhile favorites of Paw Patrol, PJ Masks and the likes.
I am not sure what draws you to these time and again. It might be the equivalent of a puppet show effect, of being able to weave stories around your toys, controlling the characters and letting your imagination fly. Suffice it to say, I dont necessailry understand the games you are playing !
Dear Daughter
A movie from 1990s (Agneepath - starring Amitabh. Not the later remake) had a little monologue
“यहाँ फ़ोन बहुत शोर करते हैं । फ़ोन भी बड़ी ग़लत चीज़ बनायी है। आदमी बोलता कुछ है और सोचता कुछ। ”
loosely interpretted as ‘Phones make lot of noise around here. Its a bad invention - this phone. The person on the other end, he could be talking of thanks but mean to murder‘
Needless to say, its the tense setup to the scene that makes these simple enough lines laden with lots of meaning and intent. And thats in the age where phones were just landline - that managed to tie down the people on both ends as well as their thoughts to a stationary context, a grounding of sorts.
Given that most humans today (going by 5 billion devices against 7 billion people) have multiple communication modes on maybe multiple phones, you have no way of knowing for sure what the context to any spoken, written or pictorially expressed words could be. Imagine the multitudes of contexts, thought patterns, meanings and intents that each of us have surrounded our single core self with. A family chat group with a bon-homie environment seperated by just a finger swipe from the love-to-hate set of collegues. Imagine what that could do to the mental pendulum responsible for balancing a brain full of frivilous feelings ?
No surprise then, we end up perpetually playing games with each other at levels we aren’t even aware of. Everybody is guilty and yet nobody can be blamed. We might not intend to make calculated moves against people we share our time with but this is where perception crosses over to be reality. Like babushka dolls, most such mental games, if ever peeled through would be found out to be mountains made out of a molehill. खोदा पहाड़ निकला चूहा. But no one ever gets to open up these dolls - maybe some but never all of them.
What suffers then is the Singular ‘self’ - the ‘Me’ tied to a single ego, living with this sense of being played with all the time. If only it could understand that the perceived player feels the same. If everyone is wrong to have that feeling, there is no case to be sorry. If everyone is correct, well you can’t expect sympathy for being a victim when you are a perpetrator yourself.
Its not a great invention - the phone or any communication device devised so far (by 2018) as they can relay words, gestures, maybe tones but not intent, meaning and undercurrents. And we have nevertheless indulged ourselves, lost even, to managing multiple channels of broken communication leading to multiple parallel cracked relationships.
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