I just dropped off Noori at the daycare and returned to the silent house.

One of the great dissonances of life is seeing your child in daycare. Seeing your child among other children, as one among the many, as equal to others in that democratic setup runs right into the special status she holds in your house, as the most central person in your family, as your Light of the Earth. The carers, as patient and attentive and caring as they are, treat your child just as another child which makes sense to you intellectually, which infact your liberal, humanist setting is keen to uphold and celebrate and yet, and yet, the parent in you, the father in you, wants them to be a little more attentive to her needs, a little more patient when she throws a tantrum, a little more knowledgeable of her specific rhythms and tics while totally acknowledging that ofcourse all kids are as precious to their parents and all should be treated equally with utmost understanding and love and fairness but then again we're all humans with limited reserves of these nice qualities and inevitably every now and then we're pushed to the brink and snap, and handle the kid a little less gently, scold them, just really fucking wish they'd stop with the crying, and it is on those days you hope for them to save that last morsel of toleration for your child.

Having spent a few hours last week with Noori in the daycare for her orientation was deeply enlightening. For one I respect and admire the carers even more now having experienced what it feels to have multiple infants crying at the same time. More importantly, enrolling in the daycare has forced really ambivalent feelings in me: On the positive side, she'll get to spend a few hours with other kids, roam around freely in a larger area, we'll get a few hours off for ourselves. On the negative side, it really irks that side of me which condescends/ is wary of marketplace transactions in the service sector for two reasons: One, my instinct is that most people are decent and well-meaning but when you put them in a work setting with an employement contract and track measurables, you somehow bypass the inherent will to do good and motivate them to game the system. So if you hold something preciously, you're the best person to take care of it. I know that assumption is not always correct nor desirable in an inter-dependent society so I'm trying to change that. Two, despite loving Noori as much as I do and having a lot of patience for her, there are days when I feel I can't take it anymore and shout at her. So if I am pushed to a state like that, any of the carers can too. As a co-human I understand and empathise; As a father, I can't stand the thought of her being yelled at or handled roughly. So I don't know how to deal with that. That makes me want to make a good impression on them, ofcourse not outright bribe them but offer some sort of a soft good, say something nice and memorable so that Dharani could be granted a little special status by association. And that feels both like the right thing to do as a father and the also the wrong thing as a member of society.

In his education episode, which remains my favourite TSATU episode even after all these years, Prof. Karthik Muralidharan said something stunningly obvious but also, for me, disturbingly provocative. He said something on the lines of how the entire country would be better off if every individual, given the same opportunities, raised to the best of their abilities and yet as a parent you can't help but want to give your child a leg up wherever you can thereby distoring the system. It infuriated me so much because from my simplistic, liberal setup, the individual is sovereign and their good and bad is theirs to deal with. And yet I knew, especially someone as privileged as I, that we do stand on others' shoulders and some are blessed with better parents, teachers, mentors, opportunities, luck, perhaps even intelligence, than others are. But I never could explain to myself why one's children are somehow deserving of the best one can muster/ afford/ bequeath when we, atleast in theory, acknowledge that all, atleast all children, are fundamentally the same. Discovering Kant's notion of 'Because human emotional capacity is finite and partial by nature.' provided some succour, so did eventually adopting a materialistic, evolutionary metaphysics. Yet, ofcourse, that undermined the pristinity of 'All Beings are Equally Equal' but I taught myself to look away from one of the fundamental paradoxes of my life. Digression: My thinking had gotten so convoluted, so bizarre at one point that for a few years I let mosquitoes bite me because I felt it was wrong to deprive them of food and, thus, life. I now am beginning to understand that becoming a parent demands a lot of change; If done well, it is an opportunity to look at one's own life and redo, or consciously embrace, one's fundamental values and activities.

Raising Noori is really challening my philosophy and politics, my inhibitions and assumptions. Since I don't want to be a father who says, "Do as I say not as I do", I will have to prepare myself to answer, or atleast attempt to answer honestly, uncomfortable, confusing, hypocrisy-revealing questions. I'm too much of a post-modernist to wish away all contradictions and unreasonableness but also enough of a scientifcally-oriented one to understand that there is value in model-building and truth-seeking, and also politically-inclined to want to do this in public and to create inter-individual commons artefacts. I imagine her asking me questions on the nature of evil, on injustice in the world, on animal suffering and environmental destruction, on my double-standards, cowardly acts, incompetence, selfishness, indiscipline, stupidity.

Sometimes when I scrutinise even innocuous-seeming decisions I have to make on an everyday basis, I'm filled with dread and fear of repercussions. Should we allow her to sleep with a pacifier- it can't be that bad and it sooths her vs what if it causes a speech impediment later on? When she's throwing a tantrum, is that a form of her expressing herself which we should allow for now because she's only 1 and she'll outgrow it, or are we teaching her that this is a way to get what you want and allowing it will entrench this behaviour? If she refuses to eat, should I distract her and feed because she doesn't know she is hungry or should I honour her internal eating-regulation mechanism? The number and weight of these everyday questions will only rise as she continues to grow- somewhere between freedom and discipline, between extreme carelessness and debilitating circumspection, between self-centredness and self-abstinence, between naive idealism and cynical pragmatism, between caring a little too much and not enough lies that right window which all of us are aiming for. What's worse is it keeps changing- because both we and the world change. And now you're supposed to identify and ascertain where that is for your kid and keep aiming for it- through every decision you get to take for them until they reach a certain age. So, now, instead of lining two targets you have to line three- the changing child.

I know obviously that no matter how well I think I'm prepared, my child will throw a curveball. At the same time, it would be a copout, a failure of imagination, courage, and strength to not work on myself for the rest of my life- for I will remain a father until the day I die. Its a delectable feast, its a frightening prospect. Even the thought of anyone causing Noori hurt fills me with livid rage. Yet, I will, inadvertently, hurt her. I will want to protect her but I must also learn to let her fall because that's the only way to climb, only way to fly. It would be great if all her mistakes would be Two-Way Doors but they can't be. I must protect her from the harsh sun but also provide enough sunlight to nourish her. How? I feel so unfit for purpose- this selfish, lying, weak-willed, ignorant, arrogant, underachieving, just-another-human-on-the-planet entrusted with raising a child. Not just any child but my precious Dharani Noor.

I see an answer; atleast a rule of thumb. For every act I do, I ask myself, if I had to tell this to Noori would I feel ashamed? If yes, don't do it. Additionally, try and do stuff that I'd be proud to recount to her, acts that would make her say with pride and ownership, "Yes, he's my nanna".

I don't have to raise her; I have to raise myself.