Skip to main content

Informed Bystanders

J once told me that she feels "different" from the other kids because they are so into their video gaming world and "all the stuff about it" that she does not understand. I asked her if she wanted to participate in it as in getting a Nintendo DS, Playstation or Wii and she was said "No. I don't find it interesting" pretty promptly. She is quite content to continue feeling different and being unable to relate to some of the things her generation finds most exciting. Thanks goodness for Hannah Montana but for her, J would have been a complete social misfit.

Apparently we are both living in the dark ages even as other parents are readying their kids for the digital world. J did come into a couple of Webkinz on her birthday - gifts from her friends. We went through the motions of signing her up on the site and such but she showed no interest in participating in the virtual world that apparently caters to the infotainment needs of kids age 6-10. Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times notes :

Webkinz World is a cross between an online gaming site, an educational site and the virtual world of Second Life, but with animals instead of people. Youngsters may also use the site for text chats with friends with whom they have shared their online identity.

Most of J's friends have hoards of Webkinz and there is always chatter about who has how many and what. I am often privy to these animated disussions when I wait with her for the school bus. Its interesting to watch the non-Webkinz kids listen from the sidelines without having any input of their own. They form the bridge between the connected consumer kids and hapless parents such as myself. In being the aware non-consumer, their role is probably just as important as that of the active participants of the Webkinz World.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques