When the Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
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Hike or no hike

 It was Sunday evening. As usual, things were not on a level plane. The kids were yelling their throats out as though we had not provided them food for days. They had eaten an apple just about thirty minutes ago. At one stage, I had given up trying to understand these three feet creatures. They had their way with almost everything in our lives. I turned to my wife. 

"What now?", I asked.

"They have not had any outdoor activity. They need to exercise, run, and go around. We can't just keep them at home", my wife said with so much confidence that I thought if I had ten percent of that confidence, I would be successful with anything in life. 

I shook my head out of habit before I recomposed myself to actually understand what it was that she said before shaking my head orthogonally in all directions. 

"Next week, we go hiking", I said to everyone and no one in particular.

So, this weekend, I took the kids for a hike in the morning. 

My wife said, "No point in both of us going out with the kids today. Let me finish up some chores. Let me bring some sanity to the place." 

I said, "Sure, no problem."

To be honest, the hike was a lot of fun; Akhil and Sahana really enjoyed the hike. I structured the hike to be at a sweet spot around three or four miles. I thought that would be the optimum limit before the parents start throwing a tantrum (when the kids throw a tantrum, it's just a matter of time before the parents join the humdrum).

After we come back home, with the kids pretty much exhausted, I was expecting them to have a rather subdued rest of the day. But, on the contrary, they were more active than ever. By the end of the day, we were pretty much famished.

Now, my wife with her confidence maxed out says, "I don't think you should have taken them out for a hike. They are exhausted."

Again, I nodded, as though in a trance and this time so exhausted that I didn't even care whether the content had any merit.

Ultimately, this is what everything transpires to. Kids are restless all the time food or no food, hike or no hike, toys or no toys, rain or sunshine, happy or sad, tired or fresh, friends or no friends, school or no school - really like that Prahaladan story where Hiranyakashyapu poses so many conditions to Brahma).

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