Randy Pausch, ‘The Last Lecture’: The Parent Lottery
I read Randy Pausch's 'The Last Lecture' on a flight. The lecture was on achieving your childhood dreams. He wrote 'I was born with a winning ticket, a major reason I was able to live out my childhood dreams'. He beautifully describes how he w…
I read Randy Pausch's 'The Last Lecture' on a flight. The lecture was on achieving your childhood dreams. He wrote 'I was born with a winning ticket, a major reason I was able to live out my childhood dreams'. He beautifully describes how he won the 'parent lottery' as he got the best, most encouraging and balanced parents. That made me think.
I definitely won the parent lottery and I hope one day our daughter will also think she won the parent lottery. The idea that Randy Pausch's family was brought up on 'dictionaries and encyclopaedias' rang a bell. Both in my parents' home, and in our own home, the bookshelves are lined with dictionaries. For every question you had, or every new word you found, you had to find the answer yourself. In fact, I cannot sit down to write a paper without consulting a dictionary. The modern version of this is Google Baba!
Our daughter's pastime at various stages in her life was thumping through the dictionaries in search of answers. In fact, while she was at college, she would send and receive two different words on SMS, a game she played with her friend. The idea was to find and share the meaning of those words. My husband and our closest friends enjoyed discussing the meaning of Urdu words, running through the Urdu dictionary. We discussed the possible origins of these words, often derived from the ancient epics.
On the parent lottery, which I won, I learnt the importance of being organised and independent. However, on the side of creativity I'm not sure that I won the parent lottery. My father was a major influence on my life. My mother mainly giving me stability. My father encouraged me to be systematic and organised and he made me a 'Kanaka Pillai' or an accountant, just like him, a Chartered Accountant. I systematically organised things and calculated most options. Add to this being a Libran, it meant weighing the pros and cons of everything, including the amount of time spent with people physically or on the phone. The negative was that I ended up with fewer long conversations on the phone and fewer contacts, unable to maintain large networks.
My father encouraged independence. At a very early age, he taught me to ride a bicycle, to swim and to drive a car. Most importantly, he taught me to travel alone. At the tender age of 11 years I negotiated two trams in Calcutta (now Kolkata), changing at a junction, to go to school. His brave exterior of encouraging independence, hid his internal fears for my safety. This became obvious to me when once I found him hanging around at the junction where I was to change trams, having followed me in his car to figure out how I was managing. Surely this helped me as later I had no fears in travelling alone to unfamiliar destinations within our vast country and internationally. We tried out the same model with our daughter and we are sure it has helped her to settle and resettle herself alone in large Metropolis like Delhi, Mumbai, Chicago, and London.
On the side of creativity, I did not win the parent lottery as my father had little understanding of the arts. To his credit he did send me to learn classical dance forms, but it was mainly for exercise as I was on the 'healthier' side as a child! The lack of creativity or instilling it in us can be seen from one incident. When my brother was about nine or 10 years old he participated in a drawing competition. For weeks ahead of that, my father taught him to draw one scene. My brother reproduced it at the competition and perhaps even won a prize, but creativity was definitely killed.
Randy Pausch describes how his parents particularly his father helped to develop his creativity by letting him paint his dreams on the walls of his room. Now for my father, that was the ultimate sin. His orderly home did not allow any such flash of creativity. One afternoon in Kolkata, my brother and I, just teenagers, were listening to the radio while parents were having their afternoon siesta. By chance some ink from my brother's pen spilt onto my father's new 'plastic emulsion' painted wall. We were frightened. My brother and I took soap and water and scraped the wall clean. We did not utter a word to my father, but sure enough the next morning while Dad went about his routine dusting, his hawk like eyes fell on the tell-tale patch on the wall. Our escapade was caught. We apologised profusely. To his credit, my father did not punish us.
While perhaps he did not understand or know how to develop creativity, he definitely knew that reading writing and developing communication skills in English were important. We were encouraged to read books. I read the entire set of grown-up books that were on his bookshelf at the age of 15. During our summer holidays when all the children were playing outside all day long, we were given passages to read and summarize in our own words. We wrote a short paragraph on what we understood of the stories about Nelson, Thomas Edison and many more luminaries.
Unfortunately, my training in economics, and that too in empirical data based work, has perhaps stifled my writing style. If instead I had studied literature or journalism, the same English writing skills would have developed in a more creative fashion. Now I am struggling to change my stifled writing style with this blog. I hope it encourages a free flow of writing. And so I am my father's daughter, still weighing too much, counting too much, but never wasting my time!
No comments:
Post a Comment