I am a male (biologically 22 + XY chromosomes) and I am a Man, am proud of it, especially I am proud of being a Father, a Dad to my daughter & son. I should not sound like a male chauvinist. It is high time that we males behave like men and we let the females be women in our everyday lives.
Biologically there are two schools of thoughts, physically man is considered stronger, the bones are bigger, longer, heavier, stronger, but genetically we always speak of Female being the stronger species as 22+XX has two copies of the X chromosome compared to one copy in us, males. Due to this there are host of diseases which are specific to males, all the X linked diseases, usually manifest in males and do not express in females, as they have a backup copy of genes.
In spite of all this science stuff, I enjoy being a male, we get to be Dads, & that is the best part of life: when I run around at my home, throwing pillows, things along with my daughter and son, my wife shouts at me, saying that I am making a mess in the house, I tell her, “we are raising kids, not making houses”.
When a baby is born, a man becomes a father. The woman becomes a mother of course, but at least for her it's an organic process. Within her body and soul, she has nine long months to get used to being a Mother. But for even the best-prepared father, it happens all at once.
Like me, I was inside the Labour room of the military hospital twelve years ago with my wife, when my senior colleague Gynecologist delivered my daughter and the nurse handed over to me a bundle of joy, a soul throbbing with life, my daughter just born entering life with blinking eyes, that’s how I saw her for the first time and I realized I was a Dad.
This year’s Father’s Day, (on 17th June), I traveled back from Kuala Lumpur to Bangalore, & was expecting to see my kids at the airport, they were not there. The moment I entered the house, it was dark & suddenly there was light, lit candles on a cake, with my kids chanting, ‘Happy Father’s Day’, came running to hug me!! There were handmade cards with wordings to say that they are proud to have me as their Dad, they had got delicacies that I love, simply awesome.
Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it-this was said by Clarence Budington Kelland.
To quote from the book The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, “ Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life”.
To pen off, I am a Male and as a Dad the greatest gift I want to give my kids is “to believe them fully, love them unconditionally (& of course the female who is their Mother!!), and be a role model for them to see & learn rather than be preaching them”.
By Dr. Pramod G. Bagali, Chief Medical Officer
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