Holy fuck can parenting be exhausting. The good days are extraordinary; And the bad days are.. relentless. Especially when one or more of us are sick, it becomes so draining, so bloody hard, so, there's no escaping that word, exhausting to put her to sleep, or to play with her, to calm her down, to feed her, to take her out. Sitting on that bouncing ball in that dark room, Tibetan Monks Chants or Hanuman Chalisa or Classical Lullabies playing in the background, toing and froing, going "aah aah aah aah aah aah ah" over and over again, while she's bawling or crying or writhing wanting to be put down or, worst of all, just being there looking at you, as 15 minutes pass by, then 30, then sometimes even 45, and I'm hungry and agitated and pissed off, just getting so worked up that eventually I snap and yell at her, or pry the pacifier away to jolt her out of that mood, and when she really cries- sometimes eventually drifting off but sometimes getting even more agitated, and I eventually have to concede defeat and hand her over to her Amma who, more often than not, manages to calm her down and put her to sleep in 10 minutes (Bloody breast milk!), and I'm standing outside, still in a neurotic state, supremely pissed at the wasted 45 minutes but also kicking myself for getting angry at a baby, my head throbbing from hunger, anger, insult, wondering where the entire day's gone and how come I have nothing to show for it (no writing, no reading, no running, no building, no watching, no swimming), and the cliche gently wafts in, "You don't know what tired means until you've had a baby".

If not anything else, I've come to appreciate how all-encompassing, how overwhelming full-time caring can be. It's not the work. The work you can get used to: In the framework of ML/Intelligence I'm into these days, since that is mostly routine work and can be easily compressed, it's not as compute-intensive. What breaks you are the surprises, the distractions, the disturbances, the constant need to keep an eye on, to acknowledge, to entertain. You can't finish one bloody thought before you're snapped out of it by some pressing need. Reminds me of that line from Shor in the City where a character goes, "Saala iss shahar mein itna shor hain ke insaan ke bheje mein ghus jaata hain". For someone who has his phone on silent and tucked away for long periods, this is nothing short of infuriating. Only problem: its my daughter and all she has to do is look up and smile, and everything else is forgotten|forgiven. Which is why I've come to agree with Geoff Dyer's assessment in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed. He says that having kids hardly makes people more gentler or kinder to others, even other kids. I still don't accommodate other kids more than I would before. Its as if all the extra patience, care, grace, love is assigned only to DN. And even that has its limits.

When I decided to take parental leave to become a full-time parent for 5 months, Sravani told me that I'd miss office in a few days. She recounted how hard some days could get, when for a 10-12 hour stretch all you have is an infant for company and you can't get a minute's respite because caring for a baby- their safety, food, rest, play- is an all-pervading job. While I understood it fairly well then, a couple of days in the last few weeks have totally driven home the point. Like I realised while wafting on and on about fatherhood and, more specifically, parenting to Shouri and Sushmita the other night, the last year-and-a-bit has deeply tested and transformed my mental infrastructure.

First is the how our marriage has moved away from being a fairly liberal, fairly individualistic, somewhat roommate agreement to something more complex and expansive. This new fact that the most important thing in our marriage now is someone other than either of us. Where earlier my instinctive framework of individual rights and responsibilities sufficed 'in the day-to-day trenches of [married] adulthood', mutual obligations and negative liberties are not sufficient when you're raising a kid together¹.

Second, raising a kid totally stress tests your ETTO configuration. If efficiency is a better good day strategy, and thoroughness a better bad day strategy, a lot of singles and DINKs in my socioeconomic state optimise for efficiency because they've managed to separate their immediate environment from the messy vagaries of the larger world (ignore polycrisis until it can be mangled into a more processable/ solvable "issue"), and its one thing we are worse prepared for when the baby arrives. One of the surprising discoveries of my recent reads is to just get a sense of how much of intelligence is about being able to compress, and babies' resistance to be generalised, their randomness is what infuriates and confuses us so much. I think this is what people refer to when they tell young parents not to be too hard on themselves. People of my ilk, protected, coddled, insulated, existing predominantly in the 'rules based order' corners of the world stack, haven't had to deal with something as powerful and demanding as a baby who refuses to do the decent thing and play by the liberal, adult rules. We don't know how to deal with that and this fortuitously discovered Taleb insight has come quite handy to me in the past few months.

Finally the deepest impact of becoming a father has been to realise how my sense of self and consciousness has expanded into including her as well. Amma used to tell me that when you have a child, its as if one part of your brain is now permanently dedicated to worrying about them. I'm neither at the permanent nor the worrying state yet, but one development that perhaps illustrates the point is that she pervades my dreams more often than not. Whatever it is that I'm doing, Noori is somewhere in the picture. At thirty-five, I'm coming to the understanding that most discussions to identify if people are deeply shaped by nature or nurture are moot; It is both. A big fear I had before becoming a father, or anyaana as she started calling me in the last couple days, was whether I would have such strong feelings towards my child. Thankfully that fear's been laid to rest; However, fatherhood is as much social as much as its personal, as much intellectual as emotional. And that means it's a craft, a practice in addition to being a biological capability, artistic and artisanal, both performance and reaction, a habit that'll make it seem way more natural in a few years. There are days when I am overwhelmed: I snap, I shout at Dharani, when I wish I could live as before. At the same time it is also true that I've crossed some self-narrative threshold- I will now always be a father, while what is embarrassing or shameful or incompetent about me will not go away just by the dint of that transition, as much as popular cinema seems to push that expectation onto us, I know I view the world slightly differently now. And here's the funny bit: its almost definitely self-imposed. For all the kicking and screaming, self-doubt and public performance, I'm a father because I choose to act like one. And one day, when I'm not paying attention, the veil will fall off and I won't remember that I'm acting.

¹I've had the double-billing pleasure of listening to the debate between Javed Saab and Mufti Shamail Nadwi on the existence of god and a couple of days later Prof. Alexandre Lefebvre's USyd talk on Liberalism, and I'm, for now convinced, that liberalism is a kind of religion and I'm its adherent. Prof. Lefebvre states that there are three fundamental tenets to Liberalism: Individual Sovereignity, Fairness, and Reciprocity. That's my natural inclination too. He also mentions irony, which I'll read as skepticism, to which I'll add curiosity. Which brings me to a phenomenal point Javed saab makes- Yes, you religious people ask questions, and so do we atheists. The only difference is that you stop at the point of your god and say this is the answer. The atheist just goes another step and asks, "What if it isn't?". It is hard to live in that permanent state of uncertainty and I can attest to it personally. So in a sense all of us need a religion that works on most normal days. And liberalism can be that too because while refusing to close down on the openness entailed in questioning, it also gives us a bunch of first principles to live by that help us live as decent, mindful, autonomous individuals. Some have argued that it deprives people of a feeling of transcendence but I disagree. I resonate with Prof. Richard Dawkins' "Science is the reality of poetry" formulation. I think we atheists, if I can be allowed a moment of immodesty, live far more intense and meaningful and passionate and, yes, transcendental lives without taking recourse in a supernatural being nor partaking in, broadly, empty, transactional, thoughtless rituals (తంతు!). But it takes work to appreciate the awesomeness of human intelligence and achievement. Perhaps our education system has failed in that respect but that doesn't mean liberalism is somehow at the root of all our ills. To live as a sovereign individual is no mean task, no minor responsibility, and I fail way more times than I succeed everyday. The fundamental paradox of choosing to live like that is to constantly confront the question of Should I change or should I remain who I am? All theistic religions seem to make it easy by creating an ideal human and then asking its adherents to try and become that. Liberalism on the other hand, while providing some objective, axiomatic principles, nonetheless does so so that the right environment is created for people do what they want, become who they want to become- "their truest self" as it were. The problem with that is assuming that there is a true self and that its good and that we can become that if we want to. All those are suspect claims and even if true, are ridiculously hard to follow. It is that everpresent misalignment that chafes many people and sends them back onto more surer ground. And I guess rightfully so- Jordan Peterson's utility trumps truth and all that. Yet on most days it is a north star, makes me a fairly pleasant and interesting person to live or be friends with (presumably), and definitely has led me down roads and opened up paths where I've found, if not always more permanent answers then atleast, deeper truths and interesting ideas.