My dad would have turned 70 today, had he still been with us. I mentioned this while eating lunch today and darling Aadyaa spontaneously cried out a heartfelt wish to him, sending her wishes out into space to him, wherever he might be! Such a simple gesture, something only a child could execute with such grace and innocence.

I spent a super relaxed day at home and at some point in the late evening, Aadyaa and me ended up playing table tennis, on the drawing room floor! She is only 5, but super interested in sports. As playing on the TT table is hard for her, I decided to experiment with sitting on the floor opposite each other and just getting used to hitting the ball at each other with the TT bat. Oh, it was so much fun! We used the tiles to carve out an imaginary table, invented new rules and even played a match of sorts!

All through, I reminisced about how daddy used to be an ace TT player and how he coached me. Evenings in the faculty club in SGPGI Lucknow, him and me, hitting away. I learnt about strategy, about when to use which serve, about assessing the opponent’s game and targeting their weaknesses. He spoke about the sportsman’s attitude (excuse the outdated gendered reference), about the need to win, about not always being ‘nice’! I don’t know how much of the lecturing got through at the time; mostly I valued the TT lessons as daddy-kiddo time! The TT tips did work and I continued to play for my college team after leaving Lucknow and even win sometimes.

Miss you, Dad. I learnt a lot about respecting young people from you and was fortunate to be the guinea pig for your parenting experiments! I hope I treat my kids with the same measured mix of leniency and discipline, with the same amount of trust and confidence and with the same sort of unconditional love!