{"id":824,"date":"2011-07-19T13:04:56","date_gmt":"2011-07-19T07:34:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/dad\/?p=824"},"modified":"2011-07-19T13:04:56","modified_gmt":"2011-07-19T07:34:56","slug":"what-matters-most","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/2011\/07\/what-matters-most\/","title":{"rendered":"What Matters Most"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I turned 36.\u00a0 And, I chose to celebrate my birthday by taking the day off, and spending it with my family.\u00a0 Lunch with my better half, play time with the kids, and finally, dinner with my family and in-laws.\u00a0 In short, one of the nicest birthdays I&#8217;ve had in a long time.<\/p>\n<p>I was just thinking about that when I chanced upon another interesting post by my good friend &#8211; Neeraj.\u00a0 Now, I&#8217;m not a fan of the obscure titles he choses for his blog posts, but he does churn out some thought-provoking stuff.\u00a0 His recent post &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/daddysan.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/17\/tempus-fugit\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tempus Fugit<\/a> &#8211; is one such example.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Preserving each memory of their children into jpegs and mpegs, struggling to find more storage, more space, more pen drives, more hard drives. Anything that could bring them closer to the myriad ways they knew their kids. I thought growing up sounded pretty hard for a parent.<\/p>\n<p>I was wrong. It\u2019s much worse.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; Possibly in a bid to rationalize my muddled priorities a couple years ago I asked myself whether it\u2019s easier to connect with your child when he\/she\u2019s a little older and able to communicate. Maybe. Then I lapsed back into my blue funk when I realized the difference between \u201cconnect\u201d and \u201cbond\u201d. Those videos of me and Tyke when he was a baby or a babbling brook weren\u2019t of vedic instructions repeated flawlessly by an eager ward. They were of delight, joy, warmth, bonding with your child and discovering what it means to be a dad. Unfortunately, there\u2019s only 60 videos worth of me getting there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I remember the time I had traded in my Royal Enfield bullet (350cc classic bike) for a camcorder, when Pumpkin was born.\u00a0 Seven years have passed since that day, and I am left richer with megabytes of memories by way of still photos, videos, mobile pics and blog posts&#8230; memories that we as a family will cherish for years to come.\u00a0 And, through this blog, I hope to leave behind a legacy of these moments for my children &#8211; a way for them to relive their formative years &#8211; something I was not fortunate to have as a child.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I still long for a ride on a bullet, and turn my head every time I pass one on the streets.\u00a0 But, I have no regrets for the tradeoffs I&#8217;ve made in my life, since my children were born.\u00a0\u00a0They bring an incredible amount of joy, fascination, amazement and wonder to our lives &#8211; just <em>being <\/em>with those two little people can do all that!<\/p>\n<p>Neeraj sums it up beautifully, when we writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Today, I\u2019m heavily invested in things I\u2019m always going to hold on to for the rest of my life; a family, children, work and friends \u2013 online and offline. The first two will always deserve more than their fairshare and the other two will always demand more than their fairshare. It\u2019s up to me to balance those inequities before time runs out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You and me, both, I say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I turned 36.\u00a0 And, I chose to celebrate my birthday by taking the day off, and spending it with my family.\u00a0 Lunch with my<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parenthood"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/beingdad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}