I reached home last Friday from work around 8.30 PM. I gave a 5-star rating to our Uber driver as he didn’t accept any calls, was not driving recklessly and the vehicle was clean. Just before getting into the car, I had a mentoring session with one of my team members. I think he went for a drink after the session. So why all these descriptors: I was in a good mood and had a nice dinner with family. I was glancing through the news. With a remote on hand, there is a lot you can do on screen. So I was trying to catch up on some things humourous on TV. I am a big fan of Amit Tandon and a Malayalam satire comedy. However, my daughter had other plans.
She sat next to me. On TV there was an animation ” So Sorry” which takes a satirical shot on politics and current affairs. We both enjoyed it and she was excited to show it to my wife as well. So we replayed it immediately, advantage of OTT. The mood in the house was jovial. Suddenly as a bolt from the blue, my daughter was mentioning an exponential equation she had solved in the evening. My wife had described that someone from her class had thrown down a challenge on WhatsApp and she took it seriously. It seems she had her after-school food only after solving that problem. Now she wanted me to crack that exponential equation. She wanted to see if I could do what she had done. Confucius has warned us of such situations, ” Life is really simple, we insist on making it ‘exponentially’ complicated“. So I was put on the spot. I had two choices. Charlie Munger’s advice came to my rescue.
I told her, ” Let me see, I will try”.
So she brought the screenshot. She had a hawk-eyed attention never before seen. After a long time, I was writing down numbers to power. I was visibly sleepy but this challenge was keeping me awake. No escaping as well. I switched off the TV screen and focused on the pen and paper. I was keeping my emotions in check and then my fingers danced with the black pen. I prayed, I remembered my old maths sir and started putting down the steps to solve the equation step-wise. The parent pride inside you doesn’t allow you to give up or ask for support. My wife was in the other room busy focussing on her latest one-page story titled” Crutches“.
I realised as I was doing that some of the basics of mathematics were still fresh in my mind. I enjoyed solving the problem in 6 steps. I was able to stroke those two lines below the final answer. I threw a challenge to check how many steps she took to solve the problem. She jumped from our 6 months sofa ran and got the book in a jiffy. It was a tense moment for her. She had taken additional steps to solve the same problem. I held my head high for some time and it was time to give the next coaching session or sermon. I told her that you would learn that there are different ways you can solve life’s problems too ( What a life lesson?). It was already 11.30 PM and I didn’t want to share my life’s other learnings. Let us keep it for another day. Knowing very well that she would increase the difficulty of the challenge further I was not surprised. She brought her Olympiad textbook! But this time I had a plan. Beside my bed, I had kept a Kindle where I was reading ” Thinking Clearly” and a physical Hard Cover book “Hero with a Thousand Faces”.
My wife told me the next day, ” It was nice to see that Dad and Daughter bonded exponentially“. On a slippery slope, I did a balancing act!
