Children and their link to Parental Ego

Recently I was analyzing the development of ego in children and how much contribution parents have in this process. I have not found the answer yet but in this process I realized how parental ego gets fuelled heavily by having children.

By the time a person reaches his adult age, enters married life, he has achieved a certain social and financial status. In this process he has also got mired in the complexities of life, the shrewd calculations to stay ahead in the race, and the constant fuelling of the ego to excel.
At this point, the desire to have a child would have these initial expectations:

1) A desire to return to innocence.. remember again how liberating free, selfless flow of thought and action can be.

2) Stay in touch with the creativity and youth of childhood.

3) Be instrumental in another being's existence and survival, thereby being selfless, giving preference to object libido (love towards the outside, away from self) over ego libido (love towards inside, towards self)

4) However, if the parent has faced a few significant failures in his life, there is a subconscious expectation from the yet-to-be-born child to succeed in those areas that the parent failed in. This could be the only appearance of pre-parental ego.

But as the infant is born, here are the ways these expectations take a different turn:

1) Association of the parent's physical and behavioral features with the child's - directly linking the parent's ego with the child's being (a reason that prevents adoption from being popular)

2) Comparision of the child with the peer age group, constantly throughout the growth phase. This again fuels the ego of the child as well as the parent, to be better than others.

3) Inhibition of the child's free expression and interests, to conform with the societal norms of success.

4) An expectation of a emotional/financial 'return' from the child when he grows up. In Indian society this return mainfests in gestures like taking the first salary to the parents, taking care of the parents when they are old, etc.


This is just a summary of the two lines of thought that may be working subconsciously in a parent's mind, before he has the child and after. This summary is not judgmental but purely analytical.

Rediscovery of India?!

1. 3 years is enough time to get dumbed down and forget how to survive here... Took me 2 months to truly get used to the roads again (ie to drive at par with the auto/cab guys)

2. lack of tools.. while putting up a train passenger list, the railway guy was using his bare hands to spread the adhesive on the train... a simple brush would've looked so much more elegant in the artist's hands!

3. garbage ...garbage .... everywhere! just an efficient garbage disposal system will give India a huge facelift.. while travellin from cbe to blr, the bushes right out of the station looked like cotton trees from some distance...when the train pulled closer they were vast fields of dry bushes covered with plastic bags...

4. public transportation.. the lovely and the ugly

the lovely: city buses have recognized market need surprisingly well! along with usual city buses, BMTC has fleets of shining volvo buses that are air-conditioned, have plush seats and play the hip radio channels on lovely speakers! the ticket price is thrice the usual city bus ticket price, but worth every paisa! (here are some pics from one mr.ravikumar's blog)



the ugly: auto-rickshaws of bangalore! the rick drivers have more attitude than any child actor of hollywood/bollywood! they will agree to go from point A to point B only if:
1. point B is en route to their home
2. point B is right on an autostand so they don't have to waste a second of their precious time waiting for passengers..
3. you are willing to go by the 'meter+50' demand...

if none of the above points are met, you may have to ask some 15 autodrivers and see them turning away (without bothering to say "no") before you find one who will say 'yes' and you'd feel blessed!

5. themepark... i've been only to Wonderla since coming here but that one experience has highly impressed me! No individual ride tickets, no impolite park employees, no kachda lying everywhere, no line jumping... the last factor caused the most exhileration in me - there was a long line for the dashing car ride, and a little girl got impatient and jumped the line and wiggle right to the entry spot where a security guy was letting the next batch in.. the security guard sternly told this girl to go out of the line and not come back for this ride!!! even though i felt bad for the little girl, i felt like clapping my hands at the enforcement of discipline!! if only more law enforcers knew the meaning of 'enforcement', india could have its common man less frustrated...

6. vehicles.. the most evident sign of a booming economy - shining cars, are clogging the roads. a new bike (ie the motorcycles) model comes out every two months! and Reva... makes me really proud - the world's cheapest electric vehicle, quite a few of them on Bangalore roads.. only problem is charging it...only parking spots of private houses are equipped with the 15Amps outlet that the battery charger requires..

Throw-away..

Today i dug in the bag of old clothes that i had packed to give away cos they don't suit me..Took out a green shirt and wore it to work..Didn't give it any thought until at the starbucks line a lady approched me to say how lovely the shirt was.... Ha! Obviously, this shirt will not go back to that bag - long live the public!

3 and more reasons why i like the US of A..

1. Overall quality of work, work culture
2. Outdoor life - Hiking, biking, watersports..
3. Comedy clubs
4. Told my boss that I will be leaving the project and firm in a month and she still backs me up like ever before, if not more! (out of gratitude that I gave her ample time to re-staff)

(wrote this while i was in US.. now i'm in India!)

3 and more reasons why i want to go back to India

1. In the first place, never wanted to settle down here..
2. Won't get fat as easily in India, as i do here..
3. Can watch those two brats grow up and hear their cribs and be part of their triumphs..
4. Can wear lovely colorful salwaars to work, or graceful sarees..so much variety!!
5. Can afford to visit the beauty parlor every month and get lavishly pampered!!
6. Can start my own business any time..
7. Easily identify with people around..
8. To add spice to the end of a dark day, I could choose to drown myself in aampanna, moghlai parota, fish roll, fish orly, chaatpapri, panipuri, aloo tikki chaat, daab chingri, malpoa, ilish paturi, crunchy jalebis, mutton chop, and otherrrslurrp...

Update on 13-July-2006: Yes! finally here!

Castaldi's Ozdust

Had a wonderful evening at Castaldi's.. The servers sang from classic musicals and they all had amazing voices.. I had my jaws drop at 'Old man river'...and was delighted on hearing 'I am not that girl' from Wicked, sung by the same lady who served us..

The O'Reilly factor in IT consulting

Picture Bill O'Reilly - a cutting edge IT consultant... Difficult??!! Perhaps not if you are an oldtimer in this game, perhaps you yourself are one!! He would have some interesting conservative thoughts in the information sharing area:

-- blogs, instant messages encourage 'instant gratification' in society
-- blogs, wikis and websites in general contain 'too much information' and are more of 'legal liabilities'

Wondering how to weigh this..

Gotto get a haircut, i look like Yoko Ono..






Added on 04 Oct:

I figure that the co-existence of this conservatism in the IT economy is important. While the IT area is dominated by Gen Y onward, Generation X may seem old-fashioned and conservative but the huge experiencebase that they carry is quite humbling for us... This addendum is to recognize that a bit of the 'o'reilly factor' is important in every team..

Random thoughts at end of work-week

In the subway train to airport today my head was heavy with the nuances of the work week.. nothing earthshatteringly important, yet they occupied every corner of my upper story like cockroaches in my baton rouge student apartment... :) I tried to sleep those off but sleep was already having a friday party somewhere..i even tried thinking of my favorite things (not ' Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens' though, there was the snow missing outside.. :) )..

Then..in the airport lugged the suitcase and my heavy backpack and paused at the ben & jerry's.. Got the smallest cone of the littlest scoop of the low fat Cherry Garcia...Took the first bite and it was nirvana... one could hear the hymnical 'aaaaaaaaah' in the back ground and me floating above all others... looking back it was like kumar and harold taking a bite of their Whitecastle sandwich.... after a long bizarre night...
(lest this blog be misread as product endorsement, i like coldstone more than b&j)

For posterity

Like every other thinking being, many thoughts zoom past my head, some I hold for long enough to share with another being/thing.. When I was in high school, it used to be a daily diary - my kitchen-sink of thoughts, then in college and thereafter it was a friend on my bandwidth, now that my lifestyle involves lot more travel I think of getting back to the journal mode again, to record the zooming thoughts for posterity, to read them years later and feel great for having/not having become wiser :)

Now it is the spring-winter in Chicago - bang before the new year but all the snow has melted.. I am just back from a 2-day skiing session on the Cascade mountains in Wisconsin and enjoying my 10 day annual vacation lazing at home, driving down to the local library and getting loads of movies and books, playing my keyboard, watching Venkie tune his guitar ad infinitum, cooking together (since our work involves travelling, we don't get to cook as much as we'd like to), and eating home-cooked meal - thrice a day!

Okay, let me figure out how I can set rest of my blogspot up!