MIDDLE
Baby Bloomer

if overnight your hitherto fairly-civilised four-year-old begins to spout words like mehbooba and jaaneman, indiscriminately to girls and more worryingly to boys, don’t blame bollywood. instead, call your cable operator and ask him to disconnect the hindi feed of the cartoon network. there i was, worried that despite an implicit ban on bollywood on tv in our home, my son was growing into a facsimile of one of those muscle-flexing over-30 dudes who keep trying to behave like 18-year-olds in countless song-and-dance spectacles.that was until i observed closely his real role model, popeye, whose fondest expression, jaaneman, is reserved for his girlfriend olive. and when he started to tell me how he had two girlfriends in school and wished to marry both, that got me to johnny bravo, his other hero, who is usually described as a man with a body of an ox and a brain to match. johnny bravo’s idea of exercise is to grimace in front of the mirror and comb his pompadour. and his idea of great music? grinding his hips to ‘mehbooba’, a hindi film chart-topper. whoever it was who said cartoons are harmless needs a strong dose of them. and in hindi. if you have to hear the word pilla thrown about carelessly everyday in tom & jerry, you’ll understand what i mean. or even when two stupid dogs is heedlessly translated as bewokoof kutta, which my son thinks is a perfectly acceptable way of addressing his classmates. which was when i decided that discovery and national geographic were perhaps better eye-candy. that’s until i found that the former is devoted to the killing rituals of animals — ranging from unfortunate-looking hyenas to particularly repellent snakes — while the latter dedicated a torrid week to love (apparently because of valentine’s day). so that went out too. ah ha, amar chitra katha, i thought. after all, stories about the ramayana and the mahabharata could only be uplifting. of course, there was the off-chance that my son would grow up into a vhp fanatic but then given the way our politics is going, at least he would end up in government some day. so began my acquisition spree. until my son started developing a fixation for mahishasura and ravana. they were evil, i tried telling him, extolling the virtues of durga and ram. no, insisted my son. they were great. after all, mahishasura had become so powerful that even gods could not destroy him and ravana had 10 heads and 20 arms. worried that i was raising a mini-monster who harboured ambitions of becoming a mega- demon, i thought now is the time, before he can actually read, to put him on to a gentle soul like tintin. for, fairytales bored him. the gingerbread man’s antics were not amusing enough and for a child who thought jurassic park iii was funny, alladin was not bloodthirsty enough. as for nursery rhymes, he clearly finds my singing voice somewhat lacking in musicality. but i had little luck even with tintin: try explaining captain haddock’s colourful vocabulary and drinking habit. as you can imagine, i have now given up on thought control. if all else fails, my son can always become a hindi dubbing artiste for cartoon network.