She is 52 cms long. Weighs 2.8 kgs and is AB+ve.

She does not respond to the name Aditi, because she is not yet aware that that’s her name.

She is 72 hours old.

And she is the best Father’s Day gift anyone can give my friend Anand Srinivasan. “The diameter of her head is 32 cms,” he beams, with the same intensity as a father whose child has topped the Board Exams.

In three days, Aditi has managed to wrap her father around her big-as-a-nail-little finger. And she is oblivious to it.

Something happens to grown men when they hold their first born for the first time. They become jelly on the inside. Till date there has been no tangible explanation for that jelly-likefeeling. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Anand gasps for words.

At 3.17 am she entered the world with a loud wail and within few minutes she was cleaned, wrapped and placed in her mesmerised father’s large hands. “At that moment my world changed,” says Anand.

“It’s a feeling that wraps you inside out. A hitherto unexperienced joy,” says Anand. “When I looked at my daughter for the first time it was as if all my troubles vanished or seemed inconsequential.”

Anand could easily be the poster child for New Dads. He’s hardly slept the last three days. He hasn’t done much in the last 72 hours other than stare at his daughter for long hours, carry her in his arms for the rest till someone in the family chide him to put her down and then he repeats the cycle all over again. “I have told him it is okay to step out once in a while,” says Anita. But Anand is like a boy in Harry Porter land.

Tender babies in the manly hands of fathers are like a concentrated ball of love. “Every time I hold her I think she is mine; my child; my love; my life,” says Anand.

During the photo-shoot as he cuddles his baby he coochie-coos, “I will make you 100 sovereigns of gold for your wedding.” His wife rolls her eyes in exasperation.

“I will teach you to play tennis. And we can go swimming,” he whispers loudly and his mother-in-law smiles benignly.

“Everything I do now is prefixed with thoughts of my daughter. It’s like I’m soaked in Aditi. Do you understand it?” he asks.

Frankly no. But certainly, my father would. For that matter, all new fathers would!