Other people’s children

As the parenting support staff, there’s plenty to give and receive

There’s been a baby boom in my little bubble of late. Even as I’ve perfected the pandemic art of “contemplating thinking about thinking” – to quote the never quoted Robbie Williams – others have seized the day and affirmed life with Olympic fervour. I am both bewildered and wonderstruck by this turn of events. True to style, every baby picture and story I receive serves to switch on my mental treadmill, racing endlessly towards nowhere.

Of mamas and memes

The attack is two-pronged. On the one hand, people you’ve known a long while decide to take up parental identities without taking your feelings into account. The transition is admittedly difficult for them, but spare a thought for us, the innocent bystanders, who now have to reconfigure our long-held relationships to admit the newcomer. It’s positively disorienting. One the other hand, the babies you lost your heart to ages ago are now fully grown humans talking about Iranian cinema and blingy bracelets. Has anyone ever asked the aunts and uncles – the invisible but powerful forces holding up the sky – how they feel about it all?

THERE’S THE PRESSURE TO NOT JUST RAISE A HAPPY HUMAN, BUT IT’S ALSO A RACE AGAINST TIME, IN SOME SENSES

Mostly, it’s fun. You get to play the role of the non-parent, which is reward enough. You can participate in the whole baby-rearing process from a safe distance, providing spaghetti or sympathy as the situation demands. You get to buy the adorable t-shirts with feminist memes and pick the books that teach kids how to plot a revolution before bedtime. Drive off to distant ice-cream parlours on a whim. (Does this still happen? I miss the ’90s.) Put up Insta stories that are the right amount of show-offy without the fear of being branded a “sharent”. Overall, it’s quite an attractive package. The need to nurture coupled with the need to, quite frankly, run far away from anything that needs nurturing.

The baby lobby

I do wonder, however, how the whole thing works. It’s too dull and dated to get into a conversation about the ethics of bringing new life into the world. But I’m amazed at how anyone is able to muster the courage to raise a human from scratch when it’s already a full-time job to raise oneself. In most cases, IMHO, it wasn’t done right the first time round. As Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse succinctly put it:

They f*** you up your mum and dad,

They do not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

What’s more, we live in the Anthropocene – a geological epoch in which humans are responsible for significantly impacting the ecology.

MOTHER COURAGE

It’s amazing how anyone is able to muster the courage to raise a human from scratch when it’s a full-time job to raise oneself

And as we all know, not in a good way. So there’s the pressure to not just raise a happy human, but it’s also a race against time, in some senses. And yet, I’ll never stop hearing that rousing argument that says a “woman’s body is designed to have a baby; bad things will happen to those who don’t.” We, the loyal opposition, risk it. As you may have observed, bad things happen to the bodies and minds of those who have babies as well as those who do not. Just like good things.

Free-range kids

On the flip side, kids can be, and regularly are, adorable, with their curling locks of hair, scratchy piano recitals and those occasional gifts of handmade cards featuring all the things you love, from yellow birds to old books. How parents get anything meaningful done is beyond me; I’d be distracted by every affectionate look and kind word. That’s until the sulking ages strike and all bets are off. I have it on good authority that the teenage years are now arriving a few years ahead of schedule, causing a premature rip in the parent-child fabric. But we, the support staff, are always here, minus the intensity. Just one of our many unsung services.

I’m a big fan of what Lenore Skenazy, a New York-based writer and activist, calls “free-range parenting”. It is the opposite of “helicopter parenting”, that constant circling of children, leaving them with no space to fail, be unproductive or bored – something that most of the grown-ups I know struggle with to this day. Here’s to more free-range kids one can adore from a happy distance.

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and needs to be integral in the way we engage with people,” Gurmeet explains. “Culture and nature are two significant aspects that make cities liveable. We inhabit our cities and hence the cities need to be responsive to us, which is what adds to the quality of life. In this generation, we need to recover our heritage. There’s amnesia when it comes to how to engage with our past and secular heritage.” Raghu has long and deep connection with the city, visiting Amritsar twice a month to take pictures. “Going to the Golden Temple is the most powerful experience ever. Even though I am Hindu, I believe in the calmness and peace the Golden Temple brings. Even when the militants were right outside, that place provided a certain spirituality that would take over,” he reminiscences about the mid 80s, when he even went with a camera hidden in a garland he was wearing and shot pictures of the damage the Akali Dal had done.

Gurmeet S Rai is a conservation architect who works in the space of natural and cultural heritage and communities; Raghu Rai, also Gurmeet's husband, is a renowned photojournalist

A lockdown longing

All the chapters in this lockdown book, for which Gurmeet travelled to Amritsar last March, end with some ideas for the future.

Familiar with the milestones of Amritsar’s history given her previous work there, Gurmeet honed her research on Jalianwalla Bagh and the Baisakhi mela. “We had to show what it means to recover original textiles and the empowering transformation that can bring about,” she says. Raghu has previously worked on a book on Sikhs, besides working with the late Khushwant Singh, but this was the first time he was working with a writer he had grown up together on the subject with for 32 years: his wife, Gurmeet. And so, Raghu’s dug into 50 years of work to cull out which pictures to use, as this is the first time he feels the photographs and the text really marry.

Writing the book was like completing a full circle when it came to Gurmett's relationship with the city and the Golden Temple. “The architectural site of the Golden Temple has aspects related to equality and humane aspects of an inclusive way of living one’s life that is relevant even today,” Gurmeet concludes.

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