An Unquiet Mind is moving…

Dear readers,

An Unquiet Mind is growing up. It is no longer an adolescent that has to live under the auspices of WordPress.com. It is now getting its own home on the web.

I cannot disable comments on this blog so please do not take the pains to comment here anymore. I am trying my best to get all the posts, comments, etc. moved over to the new site.

I shall announce the new URL when the migration is complete. Hopefully, I should be able to make automatic redirection work, so you will find it yourself!

Thanks in advance. Please bear with me till the migration is complete.

Imaginative Parenting with Fictional Characters

Kids are the fastest evolving species on this planet. Parenting techniques become outdated faster and faster. However, I think many underlying principles remain the same.

I think good parenting is not an acquired skill – because it needs constant acquiring. I need to be learning and adapting all the time if I am to be a good parent, because today’s kids are learning and adapting all the time.

I wanted to share the lighter side of this enriching and enjoyable part of my life – the use of fictional characters to encourage discipline in our 2.5 year old daughter.

The Deterrent

“Beta so ja, nahi to Gabbar Singh aa jayega” (Child, go to sleep, else the dacoit will come – a famous line in Indian cinema).

Parents have always needed external deterrents to discipline kids. Everyone imaginable – from police and teachers to demons and ghosts – has needed to be summoned to assist the helpless parent.

Boom Boom Bah

Our deterrent fictional character comes from a Marathi song from an album for kids that has become the rage among all kids in Maharashtra. Kids from a few months to a few years old dig this album like crazy. It features one song about a ghost, Boom Boom Bah, with a nice rhythmic pulsating beat, replete with screams and nightmarish laughter.

Not surprisingly, this guy Boom Boom Bah has become a friend to many Marathi parents. Go to sleep, otherwise Boom Boom Bah will come. Not taking your medicine? Boom Boom Bah will give you fever. Not brushing your teeth? Boom Boom Bah will take them away. And so on.

But, I didn’t want her to imbibe an irrational fear of an imaginary ghost. So the Boom Boom Bah character has mutated into an obnoxious fellow who’d rather be avoided at all costs. Our daughter has even learned to scold him if he doesn’t behave.

Not all deterrents need to be fictional. Our daughter knows the Chairman of our residential society as he has a young kid who sometimes plays with her. After several failed attempts at trying to stop her from endlessly playing with the tap water while washing hands or getting her out of the shower, one day her mother warned that Mr. Chairman will shut off all the water supply. This was more than a year back and the trick still works!

Lesson

Deterrents rooted in reality don’t necessarily work, because children don’t see and understand the world like we do. Use deterrents that exist in their world.

Change, refine, and adapt the deterrents to suit the situation, age, and culture.

The Incentive

Candies and chocolates in excess can be harmful incentives. Harmless incentives require out-of-the-box thinking. Our daughter is now tiring of a meal-chair that she has used for more than 18 months. Rather than sitting and being forcibly enclosed in the chair, she would like to prance around. A direct, straight-forward directive “Sit in the chair” doesn’t work.

There’s a picture of a baby on the chair. “If you don’t sit in the chair, the baby will feel lonely, and cry. It wants you” works.

Lesson

Provide incentives, not instructions.

Anuja

This was a masterstroke by my MIL. Anuja is an imaginary friend of the same age as our daughter, who likes to hang around with her and her cousins. In short, she is part of their kids group. This was established over a few weeks of bedtime storytelling involving Anuja and the real kids. Now, Anuja is becoming a more useful concept than any deterrent, since she is very flexible.

On-Demand: You don’t want to finish your dinner? Shall I give it to Anuja?

Stories with Morals: Elaborate stories at bedtime about how Anuja did not behave properly in some way or the other, leading to her punishment.

Good Behavior: Good behavior on our daughter’s part makes Anuja very happy.

Indirect Scolding: Direct scolding leads to crying and is frequently counter-productive. If our daughter behaves incorrectly in some respects, Anuja mimics her at the same time, and it is Anuja who gets the scolding, not our daughter. Sometimes, this is sufficient for our daughter to mend her ways.

These are just a few examples; the list is endless. I am simply amazed at how all this works!

Lesson

Use Incentives as a first recourse. If they don’t work, then resort to Deterrents.

Eight things you never knew about Joseph Haydn

1. Born to a wheelwright, he left home at age 6 to sing in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral. When his voice broke, he was dismissed.
2. Haydn like wine so much, he insisted that part of his salary be paid in it.
3. The greatest mistake of his life was marrying his wife. Initially, he fell in love with her sister, but she became a nun. Considered a shrew, Haydn’s wife used to rip up his scores and use them as hair curlers.
4. Haydn and Mozart used to play string quartets together. Haydn played violin and Mozart played viola. Whose music do you think they played?
5. When a Viennese pianist sneered at a Haydn passage, saying, "I would not have written it that way," Mozart replied, "Neither would I. And you know why? Because neither of us would have had so excellent an idea."
6. At his last public concert, Haydn had to be carried out in a chair, held aloft by adoring musicians. As he passed up the aisle, Beethoven kissed his hands. The audience shed tears. Before reaching the door, Haydn turned and raised his hand to the orchestra, as if in blessing.
7. Mozart’s Requiem was played at Haydn’s funeral.
8. For 150 years, Haydn’s skull was displayed at the famed Musikverein (concert hall) in Vienna. Brahms, who couldn’t afford his own home, slept in an apartment there and liked to take Haydn’s skull at night, when he was composing, and put it on his desk for inspiration.

Read the full article: Haydn vs. Mozart: the battle of the classical composers.

An Unquiet Mind of A Social Geek

Take a look at these numbers:

• This is my 267th post.
• There are 2962 authentic comments on this blog.
• My posts have 203 tags in 39 categories.
• Total views crossed 100K quite a while back.

These numbers usually don’t mean much to me. But I always use a trick while climbing a mountain. When I am exhausted and feel like I can’t go up any further, I turn and look the other way around. Seeing how much ground we’ve covered and how much height we’ve attained, is a re-energizing technique that works.

However, the need to look at these numbers now did not arise because I’m exhausted writing on this blog. Since I started An Unquiet Mind over two years back, I have written exclusively here. And now I’ve come to a fork in my path.

Discounting my professional writing at MakeUseOf.com, I have decided to start a separate personal blog exclusively focused on technology, specifically social networking and social media websites and technologies.

Since I began a writing career, I realized that being an early adopter of new technologies, I needed to participate in online communities of like-minded technology enthusiasts and industry influencers.

While Twitter has been one vehicle to achieve this, FriendFeed has been more empowering. To retain the intellectual flavor of An Unquiet Mind undiluted, I decided to post technology related content separately. Also, it did not make sense to direct the 90K+ MakeUseOf subscribers interested in cool websites, software, and internet tips to An Unquiet Mind!

Since I am known as the Social Geek in these tech circles, my technology blog is of A Social Geek. I chose Posterous rather than WordPress as a platform since it’s flexibility suits my needs better. Feel free to follow/subscribe to A Social Geek if you’re so inclined. Posts from there are also displayed in the sidebar here. Thus, my blogs reflects my two personae on Twitter – @SocialGeek maps to A Social Geek, @Palsule maps here.

At this milestone I also decided to experiment with a different theme, primarily for one reason: it gave me the push to do the necessary housekeeping of this blog that has been on the backburner for a while. I have reorganized my categories, which are now displayed at the top. Hovering your mouse over them reveals sub-categories too.

I think this will help An Unquiet Mind remain unquiet about things that matter. I think unquiet minds rule over matter, but never mind.

Image: Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings.

Out of Action for a while

Friends, thank you for visiting my blog and for your comments.

I met with an unfortunate accident end of last week, and hence will be out of action for a couple of weeks. Nothing serious, but I need to rest and recover. Thanks for visiting. I will be back soon.

India Swine Flu Helpline Details & Contact Information

With the first swine flu death reported in my city of Pune, I thought I’d provide some Swine Flu related information specific to India.

Swine Flu India is the central website for all information and updates.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has an information page for Swine Flu.

This MS Word document supplied on the above page has contact information and details of the Control Rooms and Nodal Officers/Doctors for ALL states in India. Here is the information for Pune and Mumbai:

	Control Room	Nodal Officer
Mumbai	Room No.137, First Floor, Swasthaya Bhawan, Mumbai. 022-22029070 022-22025830 [24X7]	Dr. Gawande 09420711426 Dr Awate 09423337556
Pune	Office of the Joint Director (Health Services), Central Building , Pune 020-26124299 [24X7]	Dr. Desai-09822429266 Dr. Suresh Bohatre 09881364656

 

This MS Word document has details of all Airport Cities with Isolation Facilities, while this has Guidelines for Schools and Colleges.

Please do your bit to spread information, not panic. Thanks!

Posturing From My New Chair

After months of sitting on my computer on a backless settee, I began to realize that my back has a spinal cord, and that it's made up of individual vertebrae.

But that's not what this is about. While my new chair does indeed improve my posture, this is a new posturing using Posterous.com.

I am writing this email using Gmail, sending it to post@posterous.com and attaching the photo of my new chair. After I hit the send button, I sit back in my chair.

I expect Posterous will:

• Post this email and the photo to my Posterous blog
  http://socialgeek.posterous.com
  
• Post my photo to my Flickr photo stream
• Post my photo to my Picasa web albums
• Post this update to my Facebook account (I want to see how it does that, whether it just links, or uploads the photo, etc.)
• Post this email and photo to my WordPress.com blog – An Unquiet Mind
• Post this update to my Friendfeed, which will then tweet an update on Twitter as @SocialGeek
• Post this update as a tweet on Twitter as @Palsule

Just 1 Email. Now, let's see how it works!

Posted via email from SocialGeek