Cambridge visit, expectations..

It is so hard not to have expectations for one’s own child. Before I was a mother, I always determined that I would not have any expectations for my child. I grew up in a household where my parents let us do our own thing and did not pressurise us to have a career or study a professional course. This was a big deal, specially because we lived in a township where there was incredible peer pressure. In our colony, if you were not a doctor, engineer or a lawyer, you were a nobody. A commerce degree was bad, but God forbid, you did an arts course – you might as well just move away from the colony, as you would be ostracized!! Maybe I exaggerate a bit, but I am not joking when I say that an arts degree was really looked down upon. There were hierarchies of importance within the coveted professional categories too – so for instance a degree from a government college was held in much more esteem than say a private college degree. Parents were constantly pushing their children to perform – I remember many friends of mine had deadlines on when they had to return home in the evenings – to study and were admonished if they came second in class or lost out on a single mark in say mathematics. Me and my siblings never had any of these constraints. In fact, my full-time working mother secretly hoped that my sister and I would join a non-professional degree, join a bank or the public sector, get married and well, you get the picture. My mother was quite excited when my sister announced that she wanted to do an arts degree, when she was 15. My mother’s colleagues thought that my mother was nuts to not push her daughter to study and thought that the fate which awaited her after an arts degree was voluntary suicide. So when my sister changed her mind at the nth moment and decided to become a doctor, she was quite disappointed !!

Yet when we visited Cambridge over the weekend, I could not help but think how lovely it would be if my daughter studied there. There I said it. I have already set an expectation in my head for her to do well, even before she has started school or for that matter, started speaking. Calculus is actually worse than me. He was saying that she should do her PhD from Cambridge when we visited the city last time, when I was pregnant !!! That he would be happy with whatever she does, as long as she has a PhD in Mathematics from Cambridge !! Beat that for expectation ! How wonderful it would be if she attended one of the world’s oldest universities, studied in the same college as one of India’s brightest mathematicians – Ramanujan. I know that there are hundreds of other famous alumni of Cambridge, but this name is fresh in my memory as I have recently finished reading ‘The Man who knew Infinity’.

Our visit to Cambridge was brilliant. I love the city – its cobbled streets steeped in history, its grandiose buildings and just the feeling of being in the precinct of such a great institution of knowledge. We went this time, mainly for the benefit of my parents. My parents loved the place – since my mother has also recently finished reading Ramanujan, she was reliving the events from the book where he mentions Cambridge. We could not help but ponder over how difficult his life must have been all those years ago in this strange land. Obviously my mother being my mother, her primary concern was how Ramanujan managed with food, being a vegetarian !!

The weather was brilliant too – warm, yet not too warm. We went to as many of the tourist destinations as we could manage to go with a baby – Kings College, Trinity College, Trinity Street, walked along the River Cam. The last time we visited the city, I was heavily pregnant and was hobbling along, but at least my daughter was quiet. This time along, I could walk more easily yet for some strange reason the little one kept screaming on the streets of Cambridge !!

I leave you an image of the Great Court in Trinity College, where the film Chariots of Fire was filmed.