Summer Camps

Pari's 'first' summer vacations are fast approaching, and we are excited. As a rule of thumb, we feel obliged to feel excited at all things on her behalf, since she is too young to comprehend and feel the thrill, be it the annual day, or distribution of progress reports. It is us who go with throbbing hearts and shaky nerves while Pari goes in with the calm demeanour of one going around his usual business. This reminds that I have not provided any updates on Pari since long, and there has been so much.. her third B'day, annual day, Yercaud trip. All these are things I want to write about and preserve for posterity.

Coming back to summer vacations, I did not really view it as something significant, so it shocked me to see parents regard and gear up for vacations as if it were an impending calamity. We, as a matter of fact had not thought of it at all. After all, last year this time Pari stayed at home all day long with the maid - eating, sleeping, playing and watching TV as is appropriate for a toddler. And honestly, even as teenagers, that is how we spent all our summer/winter/dussera/Christmas vacations. The TV and the walls around would change periodically, while we visited our Nani in Delhi for the vacations. But apart from that, there was nothing else that we did. Our days were full of fun just doing nothing and learning zilch. Even the holiday homework was picked up only the week before the school reopening, so busy were we enjoying the holidays. And here, schools have not even pulled their shutters down, and we are flooded with summer camps. They are all over the place - colorful banners, posters, brochures, print advertisements, even radio ads all announcing different summer camps, promising to keep our children engaged in the most productive manner. And parents are running like headless chickens to procure an entry for their chicks. Now I know why I did not do well in life.. my parents never sent me to a summer camp. But what the hell happened to visits to grandparents? I had just one set of grandparents to visit since we stayed permanently with the others. Pari lives in a nuclear family and has both the options wide open. Apart from that, she has several add-on sets of grandparents, like my aunts who are willing to trade their left eye and right arm to host her for the vacations. The family is, to summarize, an acute case of 'Parimania'. I feel so tempted to bundle her off to camp at one of these places but for the husband. My old man cannot do without Pari. He cannot sleep till Pari plants some tight kicks in the pit of his stomach, gets his daily workout by running after her every evening with the dinner and finds the task of picking Pari from school in the hot summer afternoons 'highly gratifying'. Courtesy Darling Daddy, Pari might just end up in a 'Summer Camp'!