Bringing up a kid (and one like our naughty son) is no man's job. But they just don't agree. It is all there in the books. Of course, today's fathers know how to change diapers and dress up kids - but how does he convince the kid what is the best dress for the day? It takes his up to an hour and at the end of it the boy is still in his birthday suit. Mummy has to intervene, and the ob is done in the next five minutes flat.
I remember how difficult it was to handle both, my husband and the kid, when Anant was seven months and I decided to take him off the bottle. The boy would raise a ruckus and so would the father. "You are being very cruel," he would declare. Today he prides himself for the decision he took.
And how do you convince Anant that he must wait as papa works on the computer ("I want to draw," he wails, almost inconsolably)? It is always the I'll-do-it-for-you approach of which no self-righteous child will have none. So while the father works on the computer, the mother has to handle the child and any mother will tell you what a difficult job the fathers have left for them.
My husband found a novel way of helping out in bringing up Anant. He decided he'd not step out of home for work until the boy was six months old and so he worked from home. "I'd like to have some silence," he'd say so often and was not happy when I ignored him for saying this. Silence with an infant at home - Can you match this?
And while I was sterilising the bottle, papa would come asking for tea. Papa was used to working through the nights and the son was still not used to sleeping in the nights - imaging the time I had in handling two kids.
I sincerely feel (and he is furious at the very thought) the best time I had was when he flew to Kathmandu for a seminar when the boy was six months old.
And he was back with another book on how to bring up children - this one written by a mother with her first six-month-old baby and so, as experienced as me!
Sujata Patro keeps herself busy raising her son

I know the ladies will point out that as animals, the mother's role is to nurture and the father's role is to disappear and spread his seed. But among human beings, the mother's role is taken to an absurd extreme.
So Indian women take an unnatural interest in remaining within the four confines of their home. What they discuss, or rather gossip about, remains within the family, even if it is an extended one, to the point of being almost incestuous. So possessive are they of their children, particularly their sons, that they revile sex as an unnatural and ugly thing, complicating the psyches of those boys. This is hailed, by our medievalists as being glorious and supreme!
Indian men, on the other hand, are more interested in ideas, society, history, metaphysics, and the perfect female butt. Their conversations, minds and dicks are expansive. They go out into the world - try confining the father to the four walls of his home, and watch him go out of his mind. He has to be out there, hunting for food.
If children were left alone with the Indian mother, they would grow up to be nerdish wussies, ill-equipped for problem-solving or fending for themselves in a cruel and apathetic world. The man-parent teaches them about evil in the universe, the Manichean beast, and the ways in which they should not only come out ahead, but also trample over others in the process.
It is no irony that a popular joke in India is on why Bengali men are like Jesus Christ: they live at home till they're 30, their mothers think they are God, and they think their mothers are virgins. How true.



Aditya Sinha stays within the four walls of his home and nurtures his three children.