pass the banana please

Consider the following points :
a) you are 11 months old
b) you cannot - yet - speak any of the adult words clearly
c) you really want that banana

What are the options ? You can, of course, cry. But that is a rather non-specific thing to do. It will bring either appa or amma, they might talk something to you, or lift you up, take you to another room or give you a toy. But that is not what you want... it is the banana you want, lying there, on that table, just out of reach.

There must be a better way to get that banana. You keep a smile poised, make random sounds, and wait. Sooner or later, somebody is bound to look at you. Aha, there, you see, Appa is looking at you. Now, right now, is the moment for that dazzling smile. Sure enough, he smiles back and says something. You stretch your hand, turn to right and look at the banana, then look back at him. Just to make sure the message is clear, you repeat this process five times, all the while keeping the smile intact and saying 'ha', 'hai' and 'humm'.

See, it works ! He picks the banana, peels it and ha ha, hands you a bite. Yummy.

Alphabet Dreams

Very early in the morning, 3 AM to be precise, Daivik got seriously interested in err... alphabets. Apparently he was just dreaming about "alphabets" and his eagerness to share the dream happened to be, well, timeless. With hard-to-curtail enthusiasm dancing on the sleep-defying eyes, he announced, "appa, I was dreaming about this alphabet". And using his finger as pencil, he started tracing the contours of the alphabet on an imaginary sheet of paper in front of him. Even as he was 'drawing' the alphabet, he remembered another one. Furiously he rubbed out the previous one from the 'paper' and redrew the new one, only to erase it and draw another one. After a few moments, his movements started resembling a sword fight, or more realistically, a 3AM attempt to evade a recalcitrant fly. Evidently he was having difficulties in getting the alphabet right. I'm not sure if it was the frustration of not remembering the correct alphabet from the dream or the lack of a commensurate skill  in portraying it correctly, or the tussle with an instinct that was screaming get-back-to-sleep-now, the enthusiasm slowly gave way to a whimper and hands still raised mid air and pointing at the 'paper', he drifted back to sleep. Most amazingly, when he got up in the morning-morning, he remembered the dream again, and started writing on his 'paper' right away !

I was taken back to another time, maybe 3 years ago. Daivik was making the fascinating discovery that the sounds he was learning to make, consciously, distinctively and reproducibly, actually carried meaning. They were not randomly generated noise but indeed denote something. He was mentally cataloging these sounds and associating them with objects. It was a charmingly transparent process that was absolutely mesmerizing to watch : every now and then a new word will grab his attention, he will become concentration-focus personified as we point out to the object the word denotes. Usually he will repeat the word once or twice and look at or feel the object. That's it. A sound becomes a word and suddenly acquires a meaning, the transformation is complete. Now, as words gets more abstract, the process becomes more complicated. One fine day, night rather, 3AM (again!), he sat bolt upright and started reciting all the 'words' he knew at that point.

Perhaps the same mental processes are in operation again, as he is perched on the cusp of another exciting discovery. Just as sounds becomes words and gets an identity, shapes are becoming alphabets that fill up the books !

I wonder about the 3AM connection, though :)