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My daughter made a bird feeder out of a cut plastic juice bottle. It lies horizontal, placed like one of those ships in a bottle. She cut a cavity in its midsection while leaving the structure intact. Lying on its side, it allows for a couple of birds to feed from it at once, one on each side. She taped the cut edges with soft tape so there’s nothing that could cut a bird.
We’re in the midst of a complete lockdown in Karnataka, and my wife and daughter are at my in-laws, while I’m stuck home. This is the same situation we were in a year ago, and we’d then gotten into a routine where my daughter would call me close to her bedtime, and I’d tell her a story.
When I was young, bedtime stories would mean retelling a famous story from the Panchatantra, or the Ramayana, or the Mahabharata.
When my daughter was a bit over a year old, she’d do something naughty and tell us that one of her stuffed toy dogs did it. ‘Rocky did it.’ ‘Snowy was very naughty.’ At the time, she treated her dogs as companions, having conversations with them, ascribing personalities to them and so on, so we fell in line and scolded the dog in question with appropriate seriousness. Throughout all this, my daughter would have a teeny-tiny smirky smile at having pulled one over her gullible parents' eyes.
When we moved homes, my daughter switched from her pre-school to a Montessori setup where she was in M2 - the equivalent of lower kindergarten.
Initially, she did not adjust well to it. Not the routine, not the teaching materials, not the teachers or the other kids. Every morning, she protested the whole purpose of going to school, and after a while, we felt it necessary to step in and discuss her reluctance with her teachers at the first PTM.
The parliamentary election process in India goes on for over a month in different phases across the country.
Last Thursday was ours in Bangalore. Our offices had given us the day off. The booths are crowded in the mornings, so we had a leisurely start to the day, had lunch, then took off to the booth to vote.
My daughter had come with us the last time, for the local elections.