Conceptions through Childhood

It’s amazing how we are coiled in some of the pre-formed and hard drilled perceptions and inklings that we live in. But we are and they do exist.

I am no tea drinker...I detest the taste and the so-called intoxicating aroma of this stuff, can almost make me puke. So when I see die-hard tea lovers all around me gulping cups after another, I wonder what is wrong with me. When I looked back...back into my past, I realized how my mum used to curtail us as tiny tots from drinking tea by saying, “Kaale ho jaate hain chai peene se...jaise Chanda hain...” Chanda by the way was the extremely dark maid servant at our house during those days...Never mind her name, she was so dark, as the joke goes, that we feared she could mingle in the environment if the lights were switched off at night. So from there the fear of transformation of my pearly skin into a dark mass made me sub consciously reject the possibility of ever trying it out. The thought had wired blue tooth messages to the brain and all sensory perceptions were locked against the king of drinks- tea.

Another bit that I remember was concerning the eggs of the birds. For a long, long while I lived in this notion that if humans touch the eggs of the birds, the mother bird would disown them and fly away leaving them to die. I even remember crying myself to bed for the poor unborn chick, when along with my equally adventurous neighbour, I had picked up two marble sized ones from a nest. Now recently as I mouthed the same dictum to a couple of kids in the family, it struck me how obnoxious that was. It was then I realized that my mum must have ingrained this one too, to prevent us notorious children from venturing into the nests of the birds and poking their eggs with our curiosity.

Ok, so some points surface here:
1. My mum was funny, to etch such weird ideas on our fragile minds....naah, she is cute, she did it in such a way that unsuspecting kids like us were confined to nobler actions and better living.
2. Like I have mentioned in a blog before, we are programmed in life. The way society moulds us, we reflect the same sensibilities. What is told repeatedly to us, we eventually end up crediting it as the ultimate truth?
3. Little children are dumb and would believe anything you tell them...well, at least they were dumb when I was growing up.

Oho and I forgot to add the mother of all my senseless conceptions here. Hey this one was not told by my mom, but some dumb idea or statement or inference from some great soul must have triggered this, because I have still not become so great to think of such madness on my own.

This is about how babies are produced. You’ve heard the usual...parents telling them that a little birdie came and threw drops of water on mamma’s head and the when she drank the water, the baby came in her stomach ...Whaaaaaaaaaat? And if you are thinking this is funny...hoho...here comes more... For a long while I lived in this certainty that when two people remove their clothes and embrace each other....voila! they have a good news to proclaim to the world...yup, just imagine my fear of hugging people when my skin touched theirs and sparked off doubts if this much contact was enough to get me pregnant...Would I have to call this guy tomorrow to tell him he is going to be a father...?
Phew...Thank god this turned out to be fallacious...because knowing my Achilles' heel for hugs, god knows where would my figure have reached by now....the figure of kids sprawling along... in whom I would be planting my own, even more insane hypothesis and wrapping up of the world.