Prashant Verma

My fellow men, we need to talk about postpartum care. Before Rumi was born, I read up on postpartum. Hormonal changes, baby blues, sleep deprivation, mood swings (I am thorough, bro). I thought I was reasonably prepared. Yeah, so that was a big misjudgment. I was absolutely NOT prepared. Turns out reading about this phase and actually living it are not the same thing at all. So I'm not going to pretend I have a solution. Think of this as a note you can come back to when you're in the middle of it and have no idea what you're supposed to do. 1. Put your ego somewhere very, very far away. A friend told me this before Rumi was born: "For the next few months, destroy your ego. Take everything on the chin." I nodded as I got it. Oh boy, I did not get it. Your wife has just gone through pregnancy, delivery, physical recovery, a hormonal crash, no sleep and being responsible for another human 24/7. This is not the time to win arguments. There were plenty of moments where I wanted to defend myself or explain what I actually meant. Honestly, most of those moments did not need a defence lawyer. 2. You are the translator between her and the rest of the world. Biggest learning for me. Parents, in-laws (this needs its own thread), relatives, friends, visitors, phone calls, everyone's opinion on feeding and sleeping and how to hold the baby. All of it should come to you first. You take the hit, you filter it, and only the useful and kind stuff gets to her. Someone wants to visit at the wrong time? You handle it. A dozen people want updates? You handle it. She is recovering. Don't make her manage everybody else's feelings on top of that. 3. Stop trying to solve everything. I am always in problem-solving mode, and I have learnt that females hate it. There were days my wife would cry and neither of us could say why. My default with any problem is "okay, what's wrong, how do we fix it." Terrible strategy here. Sometimes there's nothing to fix. She just needs to get everything out of her head while someone listens without turning it into an action plan. So sit with her. Listen. Hug her. Ask what she needs, and then actually do that thing. And if the crying doesn't ease off after a couple of weeks, or something just feels off, that's a doctor's job, not yours. Get help. 4. Don't wait to be asked. This one is straight from my wife. The baby is your job anyway, that doesn't count. Notice her. Get her food. Fill her water bottle. Offer a massage. Take stuff off her plate before she has to assign it to you. And every so often, give her the one thing that basically disappears once there's a newborn in the house: your full attention. Phone away, no baby logistics, just her (I was playing IPL fantasy during this phase and it was a bad decision). 5. Rehearse, if you can. If you're anything like me, you forget things. Especially at 3am. Nothing on this list works if you only read it once, so go over it now and again before the baby arrives. Be a bit deliberate about it. Looking back, I think I got "being prepared" wrong. I thought it meant knowing what could happen. What it actually means is remembering all of this at 3am, half asleep, holding a crying baby, while your wife is having one of the worst days of her life. Trust me, you're going to need it.

New (Indian) parents, you’ll probably hear comments about your baby’s skin colour, sometimes from day 1. I’ve been slightly on the darker side my whole life. Most of my family and friends are Punjabi or Haryanvi and extremely fair, so they used to jokingly call me kalu from around class 5. Nicknames are fairly common where I grew up so I never thought anything of it. But for most of my childhood I had Fair & Lovely and a bunch of other creams plastered on my face. I’ve even had baths in a bread and sugar mix (don’t ask, I still don’t know how that was supposed to work). Before my class 12 farewell I was sent for some sort of facials. I don’t think any of it helped, lol. Nobody meant it in a bad way and mine wasn’t the only family doing this. But it did get into my head. For a good 7-8 years I was obsessed with my skin tone, my pimples, my face. I’d keep looking in the mirror, I wasn’t keen on photos and I used to compare my colour with all my friends. I used to play cricket at noon and I’d tan a lot, so I stopped going out in the sun. I was just a kid. It shouldn’t have bothered me but it did. It only went away in college, when I met a lot of people who looked like me and they were great people doing great in life. Then Rumi was born, also slightly on the darker side, with a few dark patches which our paediatrician didn’t even bring up. The comments from family started almost immediately. “Rang saaf ho jayega. Shakal kaafi change hoti hai.” (Her colour will clear up, the face changes a lot.) Saaf literally means clean btw. I let it go 3-4 times because I thought it was a one-off thing. When it kept coming I finally told them it doesn’t really matter, I’m dark and I’m fine, she’ll be fine too. I also said she’ll stand out because people want originality, which now that I think about it was me still trying to sell her colour to them. Piyusha went one step ahead and told them dark-skinned people are lovely, in fact she likes them better, it gives them a great personality (well, she married one). Everyone laughed it off. They love me the way I am, I know that. By month 5 her colour did lighten and the comments became compliments. And the first thing I felt was, at least now my family will be at ease. I know it’s a weird feeling to have, but still.

New (Indian) moms, you’ll hear this sentence at home sooner or later. “Why are you bothering him with the baby’s stuff? You should manage it.” We’ve heard versions of it multiple times in the last 6 days, from my mom and from close relatives. One of those times I’d been glued to my laptop for 3-4 hrs. Piyusha had only asked me to take Rumi to her room, because putting Rumi to sleep is my job now. It’s quicker when I do it. Piyusha and I pushed back right there. We told my mom this isn’t the right way. Putting Rumi to sleep is my role, both of us agreed on it and we have a system now. Parenting in India is changing and the old way of leaving everything to the mother wasn’t right. My mom agreed pretty quickly, she always does when we push back. She says of course the traditional way wasn’t the best way to raise a kid and she doesn’t support it. She’s only telling us how she sees it because that’s how she lived it. A close relative added that in our village and home town (Gurgaon) no husband was involved with the kids at all. They never even showed any intent, maybe some playtime once in a while. And then a day or 2 later, a remark like that comes again. What gets me is that it’s the older women in my family who say it, way more than the men. I don’t think they want this for Piyusha. They did all of it alone and after so many years that’s just what a mother’s job looks like to them. My mom raised us with no nanny and no support for the most part. My dad was busy with multiple jobs just to make sure we had food on the table (we’re grateful for everything). She gave up her hobbies and her aspirations for us and nobody asked her if she needed a break. Then there’s the other side of it. A few days ago I took Rumi out for a walk alone, 30-40 mins. Very normal stuff. My parents were extremely happy that I was doing this. Whatever little I do, whenever I do it, gets treated like a bonus for Rumi. Meanwhile, Piyusha is up extremely early every day. She manages all the feeds, prepares Rumi’s meals (we’ve started solids, so she’s making different things and reading up on what comes next), sorts her clothes and shoots reels for her own work, because she’s a full-time content creator. She’s carrying about 70% of this, to be honest. The praise she gets is pretty muted. Piyusha told me the bar for her is so high she feels she’ll never reach it, and the bar for me is non-existent. I used to like the praise. Now it’s slightly irritating. When it comes I look at Piyusha and try to console her with my expressions, because I can see how it makes her feel, invalidated and unseen.

Crackers on Diwali, fine, I can sorta tolerate you. But the guys still bursting them two days later, right after I've spent mins getting a 9-month-old to sleep, with 2 cats hiding under the bed since Sunday? Absolute scum of the earth.

2 months of posting on Twitter and the only law I've found: the engagement on a post is inversely proportional to the fucks you give about it. The postpartum care post for new dads, I typed as a reply to some guy whose baby was due in 12 days. Didn't reread it, didn't check the time, just posted. 670K views. Part 2 of the same thing: a week of notes, 3 rewrites, a photo, posted at the right hour. 3K. The cats and Rumi post took 10 mins and a photo I already had. 20K and more likes than anything else I've written. The birth day post I wrote out hour by hour over 2 days: 7K. I don't know why. My guess is people can tell when you're trying. But I've stopped trusting my guesses, because the post I was sure about did 448 views. I've spent 30 seconds on this one so let's see if the hypothesis holds.

Some time back, my wife sent me an Insta post. It was about a mom confessing she regrets having her kids. It had ~5K comments, most of them from other moms saying the same thing. Piyusha sent it with no message. She didn’t need one. I realised I was being a great employee at home. I wasn’t being a co-founder. Everyone told us a baby brings you closer. 6 months in, here’s what I’d say. It does, if you work on it. If you don’t, it slowly goes the other way. Nobody warned us about that part. Here’s where I screwed up. On paper we split everything - nights, feeds, diapers. But I had a switch. I’d do my part and switch off. Gym, a call, sleep. She never had one. The day it hit me, I’d just come back from office and was packing my gym bag for a 2 hour session (I’d skipped the day before). She asked, “So you’re planning a 2 hour session today? Great.” No sarcasm. Just a flat “great”. I put the bag down and we sat on the bed and talked. She hadn’t been to the gym, the office or out with friends in 5 mths. I’d done all three that week and hadn’t even noticed. She said she felt empty. Then she asked me to come up with a system. That’s when the employee thing clicked. Tasks done, shift over. That’s not how you run a company with someone. So I came back with 2 rules. Both are on me. 1. One day a week, she’s off. Off as in out of the house, not helping from the next room. And I plan it, because a day off she has to organise isn’t a day off. We started with Sundays and I broke it in the first month. I’d make plans on a Sunday without thinking and her day would just get skipped. So now we have a credit system. If either of us has to move a day, we say it in advance and take it later. Her day doesn’t vanish anymore, it just moves. 2. One block every day where she doesn’t have to think about Rumi. I used to ask her everything. Which onesie, which diaper (there are like 4 kinds and they’re not the same), which one goes on at night. Every question was me handing the thinking back to her. So I stopped asking her and started asking the nanny. She taught me everything in a week. Now I just find stuff. It’s still a work in progress. We’re figuring out the rest and some weeks the rules slip. If you’ve got something that works in your house, tell me.

I'm an engineer. I'm the guy at the dinner table who ruins everyone's superstitions with a five minute explanation. Vastu, rahu kaal, the lemon hanging off the car, I've got a take on all of it. Nazar is the one I've never been able to explain, and after Rumi was born I just stopped trying. A couple of months back Rumi lost it completely. She was 7 months old and it was past 6 PM. We fed her, changed her, rocked her, called the doctor on call. Nothing was wrong on paper, she just kept going. Then my mom said, very casually, that Piyusha had posted a picture of her after a long time, and maybe someone's nazar had got her. We laughed it off. Thirty minutes later we were still standing there with a screaming baby and said fine, do it. The nanny warmed some spices on a tawa, carried them across the room over Rumi a couple of times and dropped them into a pot. Ten minutes later Rumi was fussy instead of furious, and 30 mins later she was asleep. I don't want to believe it. I was there. Weirdly, its hit rate is 100%. The part that bugs me is I've seen it before. When my brother was about 4 he was out all day with some relatives and came home berserk. No fever, no fall, nothing anyone could find. My grandmom said the same word. My mom lit a diya in the kitchen, dripped oil over the flame with that fire thing, and he settled. I was a kid and I remember thinking, okay, so that's how it works. Here's what I tell myself. You only do nazar at peak crying, so it can only get better after. 30 mins of arguing plus 10 mins of ritual is 40 mins of a baby wearing herself out. A baby held by calmer adults calms down. And I remember the night it worked, not the nights it didn't. All true. We still do it. And it isn't an Indian thing. Greece has mati, Turkey hangs that blue glass eye in every shop and car, Italy has malocchio, and in Mexico a grandmother will pass a raw egg over a crying baby for mal de ojo. The Americans don't have a word for it, so they call the same baby "overstimulated" after a day of being passed around and admired. Same diagnosis, different pot. Friends of ours with kids, people who write software for a living, quietly admitted they do it too. The nanny does it when she's around. Our moms do it when they visit. Piyusha has sort of trained herself now. I just hold Rumi and keep my mouth shut, which, for me, is the real miracle.

Hemal, congrats man. Since you asked, I’m about 9 months ahead of you and there’s one thing I’d put at the top of the list that nobody really told me about: postpartum. Not the baby’s, your wife’s. I actually read up on it before Rumi came. Hormonal changes, baby blues, sleep deprivation, mood swings, all of it. Thought I was reasonably prepared. Yeah, no. Reading about this phase and living it are two different things. So I’m not going to pretend I have a solution, think of this more as a note you come back to at 3 am when you have no idea what you’re supposed to do. 1. Put your ego somewhere very, very far away. A friend told me this before Rumi was born, “for the next few months, destroy your ego, take everything on the chin.” I nodded like I got it. Oh boy, I did not get it. In the first few weeks my wife would snap at people, me included, over stuff that looked completely random. My instinct every single time was to explain myself. What she actually needed was for someone to hear her out. Your wife has just gone through pregnancy, delivery, a hormonal crash, zero sleep and is now responsible for another human 24/7. This is not the time to win arguments. There were so many moments where I wanted to explain what I actually meant. Honestly, none of them needed a defence lawyer. 2. You’re the translator between her and the rest of the world. Biggest learning for me. Parents, in-laws (this needs its own post, trust me), relatives, friends, phone calls, everyone’s opinion on feeding and sleeping and how to hold the baby. All of it comes to you first. You take the hit, you filter it, only the useful and kind stuff gets to her. Someone wants to visit at the wrong time? You handle it. A dozen people want updates? You handle it. She’s recovering, don’t make her manage everyone’s feelings on top of that. 3. Stop trying to solve everything. I’m permanently in problem-solving mode and I’ve learnt that my wife hates it. There were days she’d cry and neither of us could say why. My default is “okay what’s wrong, how do we fix it.” Terrible strategy here. Sometimes there’s nothing to fix, she just needs to get everything out of her head while someone listens without turning it into an action plan. So sit with her. Listen. Hug her. Ask what she needs and then actually do that thing. And if the crying doesn’t ease off after a couple of weeks, or something just feels off, that’s a doctor’s job, not yours. Get help. 4. Don’t wait to be asked. This one is straight from my wife. The baby is your job anyway, that doesn’t count. Notice her. Get her food, fill her water bottle, offer a massage, take stuff off her plate before she has to assign it to you. And every so often give her the one thing that basically disappears once there’s a newborn in the house, your full attention. Phone away, no baby logistics, just her. (I was playing IPL fantasy during this phase. Bad decision.) 5. Line up a lactation consultant before the delivery. We assumed feeding was the easy part. Then we got home on night one and it all fell apart, the baby wouldn’t latch, she kept crying, and you lose your head completely when that happens at 2 am with nobody to call. Ask your hospital now if they have one on the floor, and get a number for after you’re home. Trust me, you’re going to need it. (I’ve written a bunch of these on parenting, they’re all on my profile if you want more.)

In Gurgaon for a few days and the thing that gets me every time is the wine shops. Every few hundred metres there’s one, and it’s not a shop, it’s a mini mall. They have heavy chandeliers, marble floors, a whole wall just for Laphroaig, and a guy at the door who greets you like it’s a hotel lobby. Then you step out onto the road, which is a different story, and the drain next to it is a whole other story. People here have their priorities straight lol. Just Gurgaon things.

A friend of mine has been in Europe for 6 months doing his Masters, 6 more to go. We were on a call some time back, he was cooking his own dinner and I asked him what he misses most about India. I was expecting food, or his parents, or friends He said “being privileged.” I didn’t know what to say for a second lol. But he was dead serious. His point was that if you have even a decent amount of money in India, your whole life runs on cheap labour and labour laws that nobody really enforces, and you get so used to it that it stops looking like privilege and starts looking like normal. Food at your door in 10 minutes. A plumber who shows up tonight, no appointment. Someone cooks, someone cleans, someone stands in the queue for you. The whole Blinkit and Zepto thing only exists because of this. And honestly, he’s right, I’ve felt it on every trip and just never said it that bluntly. I was in the US for 3 weeks in September and by day 4 the thing I missed most was Swiggy. Not even a specific dish, just the fact that food shows up. Back home a delivery costs roughly what the plate costs at the restaurant. There, getting food delivered is a luxury and it’s priced that way, so you cook, or you walk. Anyway he went back to his cooking. 6 more months of that for him.

There’s a small temple in the lobby at Manipal Domlur, right before the surgery wing. I noticed it a month back when I took my mother-in-law to the ER (high fever, swine flu) and went down to the pharmacy. ER visits are stressful AF, and I ended up standing there for a bit. While I was standing there, four men stopped at it. Somewhere between 35 and 60 yrs old, and clearly from very different worlds: a couple in branded clothes, a couple in simple traditional attire. All four did the exact same thing. Slippers off, eyes closed, and they stayed. These weren’t quick fold-your-hands prayers. They were long and deep and you could sense the anxiety and the desperation from across the lobby. You don’t have to ask what anyone is praying for there. Twenty feet from the surgery wing, every prayer is the same one. It was quite moving and humbling to watch. I could feel their pain, their anxiety, and some part of what they were wishing for. The whole building is scans and specialists and the best medicine money can buy, and the temple inside it probably gets the purest, most powerful prayers in the city, because everyone there has come for one reason and they’re at their most vulnerable. It made me realise how having your health, and the health of the people you love, sorted is one of the biggest luxuries there is, and we take it for granted every single second. I stood there and thought about Rumi, about Piyusha, about my parents. If it were one of them behind those doors, I know exactly how I’d be standing. Same as those four men. Slippers off, eyes closed, praying honestly. MIL is fine now, by the way.

At this point I’m more scared of my Claude chats leaking than my browsing history. I literally ask it the dumbest questions. Some of them twice.

I thought reading about postpartum made me ready. Rumi arrived and proved me wrong in about a week. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about what this phase taught me as a husband. It travelled much further than I expected, and a lot of soon-to-be dads wrote in. But a post can only hold so much, and there was more I wanted to say. So here's the longer version. The one I wish someone had handed me before Rumi came. None of this is expert advice. It's one tired dad's notes from the middle of it, written for the men who are about to be where I was. Rumi is fine, by the way. Rumi was always fine. It's the parents who need the manual. If you're in the thick of it right now, I hope this makes the hard days a little lighter. And if you know someone who's about to become a dad, send it to them. They'll need it at 3am. Save this one.

Last night’s multi level marketing pitch at Starbucks had me 90% sure of what I was watching. Then a fourth guy walked in whose only job was to explain it’s not an MLM, lol. It went to 100%. Full story below. It started with two guys and a girl. Both guys very polished, she looked barely out of college. From what I could gather they had common friends and had worked together at some point, so a friend brought a friend. The first half hour was both of them glorifying their lives. Conference in Malaysia, another one coming up in Dubai. They’re free, they decide their own day, 3 or 4 hours of work and a lot of money. At no point did they name the company. She asked, very politely, what the company does and what the products are. Both times the answer was “someone else will explain, you’ll get to know eventually.” Then guy #2 stepped out and I could see him on a call, clearly coordinating with someone. I knew what was coming. Bang on, 20 mins later a guy walks in wearing a full suit, tie, Rolex. The boss. And he went straight at her. “If you’re so entrepreneurial why haven’t you started a business? Why did you have to wait for this? Why have you never worked at a startup? I don’t think you have it in you.” I felt bad for her because the questions were genuinely stupid, and guy #1 and #2 were batting for her the whole time. Massive respect to her, she fielded all of it without flinching. I tried to take a photo and couldn’t without being obvious, and I didn’t want to kill the show. At one point all three of them stepped out and I thought this is my chance to tell her it’s a standard MLM pitch. I couldn’t. They were watching her from the outside. They came back and the script had flipped. Now the boss is ordering coffee for everyone, mellow, almost warm. He boasted that he takes Three 3 vacations a year, has every luxury, 500 people reporting to him, and the company takes care of him. He was exactly like her 15 years ago, before guy #1 and #2 found him. She has rough edges but he’ll coach her personally. “Are you good with people?” She said yes, she’d done a lot of people management in her last job. He walked out leaving her with the feeling that she’d probably make the cut. Then the part I did not expect. Guy #4 walks in. Normal clothes, no costume, spoke really well. His whole job was damage control. The company has been misrepresented in the past, people think it’s an MLM, it isn’t structured that way at all, they don’t even sell products to their own people (Amway). It’s about building a chain of like-minded people who come up with business ideas together. Bro. One person brings two, two bring four. I just kept listening. It's a pyramid scheme. Somewhere in the middle I ordered a second latte and my sleep got fucked, but it was worth it. When she finally got up to leave I was going to catch her at the door and tell her not to stress about any of it. Guy #1 was already waiting there for her. From her face I don’t think she was sold, she had the apprehensions any normal person would. But guy #4 is what stays with me. They know people have caught on, so they’ve got a man whose job is to fix the story.

Okay guys so I am having coffee at Starbucks near my house and some people are pitching their multi level marketing scheme to a girl right now (seems like an onboarding). I have removed my headphones. I’ll share what I learn.

Sorry, it had to be done. Took AI one evening to do what Gurgaon wedding planners will take one season to charge for.

Wedding planners in South Delhi and Gurgaon will be losing their minds with this launch. This car screams ‘North Indian shaadi entry car’. It even comes with the cold pyro built in. This shaadi season will be insane. Only thing that could top it is a Fortuner doing this.

If you're due soon, send this to your husband. The day our daughter was born, from my side of the room. We stayed home for early labour on purpose. Then Bangalore traffic turned 35 minutes into an hour, and when we reached, Piyusha was too far along for an epidural. What the birth plan saved us from, and what nobody warned me about.