(Was thinking hard about which picture to put here and saw Raunak wearing this tee with his favorite Japanese characters! Picture taken from my brand new Nexus One.)My next trip reminds me of a very amusing incident of Raunak when he was 2 years old. He met his talking milestone very quickly and could speak clearly by the time he was 1. I was cleaning the sofas one day when I heard Raunak talking to himself while drawing something. I quietly sneaked up behind him see what he was drawing -- pictures of some people.
'Who are they?', I asked. 'My friends', he replied. 'This is Shizuka Minamoto, these are Matsuzaka and Yoshinaka, this is Nobita Nobi". I felt the blood drain from my face as I realized that all of these were Japanese names. The first thought that formed in my mind was 'reincarnation?'. What else could explain how a 2 year old knew so many tough-to-pronounce Japanese names? I rushed to our room and told Ranjit what I just heard. 'So?' he said. 'What is the logical explanation? How does he know so many Japanese names?'. ' 1) You can ask him, 2) TV?' he muttered while going back to his mindless surfing of channels. '1) Why didn't I think of it?, 2) Why didn't I think of it?' I thought. I spent the next few hours watching kiddie channels and realized that Indian TV is flooded with Japanese cartoons dubbed in Hindi. All the names he rattled are cartoon characters.
I now know a lot more about TV and Raunak. I just asked him 'I am going to the land of Shinchan Nohara. What do you want from there? Dorayaki?' and he said 'Nothing to eat ma. Get me bakugans'.