Never wake a sleeping baby

Deepika and Ranveer pleaded with paparazzi to let their baby sleep – here’s why

Never wake a sleeping baby. That is the first hard lesson all new parents learn upon having a squawking newborn thrust upon them. Waking a sleeping baby is akin to poking a napping lion with a broom just to see what happens, or lighting a match around an oil spill, etc., etc., Not at all recommended, unless you relish the company of things that are loud, out-of-control, and foul-tempered.

Deepika and Ranveer’s

pap plea

Now that they have been in the company of their baby daughter Dua for four months, the ‘never wake a sleeping’ lesson is something that Bollywood power couple Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh will have had ample time to learn. Which, presumably, is why Ranveer asked paparazzi at Mumbai airport earlier this week to keep their distance as their baby daughter Dua lay sleeping in the car.

Oh sure, there will also have been an element of protecting Dua’s privacy, which is a noble (albeit somewhat tricky) goal when both parents are paparazzi magnets. As Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, and every British royal couple have all learned, the surefire price of fame is waging war against a voracious appetite for pictures of their children. Those of a certain age will recall that the king of pop Michael Jackson – not a camera-shy individual by any stretch of the imagination – had an ingenious solution for keeping his children’s faces out of the media: he covered them in masks.

Deep-Veer are not quite ready to borrow the mask idea just yet, although maybe the reason they have not thought of such a genius plan all by themselves is because they are too sleep-deprived to think straight. Especially after an overseas flight with a four-month-old baby. As anyone who has travelled on a plane with a small child will have deduced by now, if that baby is asleep in the car right now amid all this hullabaloo of airport chaos and trigger-happy photographers, the odds are extremely low that she would have slept through a flight from the Maldives – which is where little Dua had been with her parents to celebrate her mother’s 39th birthday.

How the other half lives

Naturally, you will have deduced by now that Deepika and Ranveer are not ordinary parents. For one thing, they can celebrate birthdays in the Maldives. The sort of luxury that allows such plane-hopping behaviour inevitably means you (well, they) have the additional luxury of leaving their sleeping baby in the car so they can appease loitering photographers. If you would care to glance through a report by The Indian Express pertaining to this very event, you will also note that not only could Deepika and Ranveer afford to leave baby Dua asleep in the car, both parents were also suspiciously free from the mountain of luggage that every new baby entails. Rather, they radiated the smug luggage-free joy of a newlywed couple who have just returned from their honeymoon.

(Smug newlywed types are the sort of couples who have the freedom to leave the house by deciding on the spot, “Let’s leave the house,” and step outside free from the tentacles of overflowing diaper bags, strollers, and baby slings.)

Due to their seemingly carefree – and hands-free – airport display, sympathy for Ranveer’s don’t-wake-the-baby plea is somewhat limited. But still. Do he and Deepika deserve the clickity-click of cameras to snap their baby out of her nap?

How to get a baby to sleep

Before we ponder whether this Bollywood power couple deserves such a fate, for the unversed, here is a quick snapshot of just how to master a baby’s sleep schedule. If, by the way, you young parents have already mastered a sleep schedule, you have most likely given birth to a unicorn. If the rest of you sleep-deprived parents are now asking “What is this schedule you speak of?”, you have on your hands a dragon baby. This is the much more common type of baby found in nature (but not on social media, which is infested with unicorn babies designed to keep the human race ticking along.)

If this is your first rodeo as a parent, you must first set aside at least 30 (sometimes 60) minutes of pointless rocking prior to every nap. Why? Because that is the agenda that has been dictated to you by your baby. Like a hostage, you cave in to all her demands, because she can articulate her point exquisitely via the medium of shrieking. You will have heard of mythical babies who self-soothe and fall asleep after quietly admiring the ceiling. You do not have this baby.

So you walk and rock and sing, walk and rock and sing, walk and rock and sing. This is your life now. Running on two hours of broken sleep spread over the past two days, you rack up your step count, easily smashing the WHO-recommended 10K steps a day target in one evening. You jiggle your baby up and down and decide you may as well practice for that singing career you secretly wanted to embark on ever since watching American Idol. You sing every song you know from memory until your voice grows hoarse and your arms ache as if you have been carrying a giant bag of rice since the crack of dawn. (Which, in effect, you have). Success! Your baby’s eyes droop shut! As if handling a live grenade, you gently – ever so gently – place her in her cot.

Your baby is far too clever for these tactics, however, and wakes up to give you a supercilious side-eye. A picosecond later, she begins to shriek loud enough to summon all your neighbours, as if you have placed her on a bed of broken glass instead of a 1400-thread count cotton bedsheet. You return to the walking, the rocking, and the singing. And so the weeks melt away into months, until one day, you become such an expert that you actually manage to dupe her into sleeping on her cot for a glorious five minutes before she clocks on to your betrayal.