In praise of the little man :-)

The little man celebrated his birthday on the 20th of this month. Sadly though, I wasn't there to see him play host to his "best friends" from the apartment building where he lives and from his class at school. Nor was I there to feel his special "smack", oh-so-wet kisses.  

Because I was on the road, getting back home from a motorcyclists event at Mahabalipuram.

I will be catching up with the little man and making up for missing his birthday. And if I know him, he wouldn't sulk or throw a tantrum about the fact that I wasn't there. Still, missing his birthday does rankle me a lot!

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What exactly is the little man to me?

Well, he is a lot of things most children are -- lovable, petulant, demanding and so on...

And also, in a very peculiar way, an yardstick of how bad my ears are :-)

Some 4 years ago, on a train trip with my family to Tirumala, while we were in the upper berths and indulging in horseplay in the rattling and clackety clack din...the little man tried his level best -- for something like two / three minutes to tell me that he was sleepy and wanted to sleep. Then, being the smart fellow he is, he just mimed it.

Around that time and much before the train journey, most of my motorcycling and wandering in the open spaces around my place were also driven by the need to satisfy his walkabout nature.

It wouldn't be much of a revelation then -- if I own up to the fact that I discovered the buffalo wallow purely due to the little man's interest in going to "waters", since he liked throwing pebbles into the deeps.

(It was on one such trip that I saw a lot of birds at the wallow -- black winged stilts to be exact -- and got around to getting more "reach" to photograph them; so the credit for my being a birdman goes to him too!)

It wouldn't also be much of a revelation then that I miss spending time with him and chafe at the bindings of an idiotic adult world that ensures that little men (and women) are so burdened by school and outside-of-school tuition that they have no time to play, monkey around and generally be just children.

(Also, its not that he wasn't coming to my place enough. Rather he would be mostly disinterested in anything as real as a walk or a motorcycle ride. Then again, at the very mention of the quarry or the buffalo wallow, my mother would become murderous as she did not want her grandson to be exposed to "bad air" and "germs", etc. Lastly, there were always various other virtual attractions -- the desktop and the laptop(s) and his tablet and my cellphone and of course the TV...)

But then, if you wait enough, everything in life turns full circle, does it not?

So, one fine afternoon around a week ago (the day before Sankranti, in fact), when as usual with my hearing aids not doing much, I invited the little man for birding, he surprised me by agreeing. And then, when my mother turned protested, the little man quelled her objections adroitly (I did not hear what was being said, I just noted that he probably said one or two sentences in all).

And, thus history was made!

But that's not all. The little man also took recourse to a notebook and a pen -- to write down instructions for me, more or less to say that :

1.) He will be carrying along the notebook and the pen, just in case I cannot hear when he says something to me.

2.) I should carry some money with me, because if we stay out too long and he gets hungry then we may need to buy something for him.

As it turned out, he bought his favorite biscuits and some bubble gum (one for him and one for me -- according to him) and we made it to the wallow and I put up the tripod (with him offering to help carry the tripod on the way) and set up the lens too.

But then, his snacks got over, he got bored (and progressively tired) of standing, and we did not do any photography as such.

Oh well, there would be another time again, I am sure.