Juggling thoughts

Faith is where we find ourselves after we are dedicated to exercising baby faith step by step. But the truth is, most of us who wants to be perfectly great, don’t want to do anything on a small scale. We often want Moses- parting-the- Red-sea types of results, but do not want to see through ourselves where and what we lack. We only want to be safe on a giant ark in the middle of a flood but do not want splinters from sanding down the wooden planks needed to build it. Than I thought of Noah, for him, cutting down the first tree to build the ark as told by God was the smallest and the first measure of “Faith” and a huge amount of humility that nobody saw except him and God. For us, baby faith might mean surrendering our weakness of being too prideful of our own ability at times.  It might even be that morning prayer claiming peace and protection in Christ and the unexplainable serenity of the day. Or it might simply mean dropping in a furniture store and picking a new design of ...

  An old conversation with friends on marriage and kids during our college days got stuck in my mind lately.  Those days when we were not very keen to get married, and I would joke around saying that, if there is one thing I would consider a good-enough reason to get married and have kids that would be to have sons so that I could raise them up to be a change in the stereotypical patriarchal society of ours. So was it, God gave me two sons, maybe He is convinced  of my idea! Parenting in this generation has taken a paradigm shift, the goals for raising girls have evolved, but those for raising boys have stayed stagnant  somehow. Progressive parents are encouraging their daughters to take the steps necessary to secure an independent, fulfilling life now, more so than ever. This is all well and good, but what we are not doing is preparing our sons for women who possess these values. Now that I am raising two boys in my home, I have been meticulously trying to break awa...

I often write about gender based issues and the stereotypical categorization of male and female roles.  ‘Gender Sensitive Language ‘ is one profound topic to be addressed at present. I had my thoughts more provoked on how the language  we use at home as parents and at school as teachers matters a lot. It matters because words and thoughts are interlinked. We are culturally restricted in balancing gender. We often  get mixed up with gender based and sex-based teaching to our children. Many of us  grew up in the much male-dominated culture which were built on gender basis. And we thought the world and the society is all about what men can do and what women cannot or are not allowed to do.  Some of the most cliched sentences that we still utter to our children without even thinking about the differences we are creating in their understanding about gender are like:  ‘boys don’t cry', ‘girls are nurse, fireman are boys, boys are soldiers', ‘be strong like a...