Vaatupura A Jayaprakash
Where does a modern child suffer the most abuse from? Any idea? The English have a saying in this line: ‘there is virtually nothing that parents cannot do for their children”. Does it not sound good? Sure it does. But this saying has anther clause at the end. It is: “either good or bad”.
So, there is virtually nothing that parents cannot do for their children, either good or bad”. Again, where does a modern child suffer the most abuse from? You know by now. Yes, it is parents who pester their kids to do things they don’t want to. It is again parents who spoil their kids by stopping them from doing whatever they desperately want to do. These two propositions are equally dangerous.
As we are living in an age where everything is taken in terms of investment, educating the kids most cost-effectively and commercially viably is one of the biggest investment challenges faced by our nuclear parents. They go to any length to ensure that their kids get the best of education and, even if they find their otherwise brilliant kid become a moron engineer or an incorrigible doctor, not by any accident but by clear intent, the parents are not moved, neither are they able to perceive the danger it poses primarily to the child, secondly to the family, thirdly to the society and finally to the nation at large.
What all ways our parents adopt to achieve this fiat:
· It is studies all the way: from kindergarten to computer engineering. Students are supposed to study all the time.
· No play of any kind. If ever a child shows some inclination towards a game or a match or a leisure time activity, what the parents see is a catastrophe.
· Never meet or sit with pupils who are less privileged than thou. Socializing is taboo. Right to school and back to school bag and studies day in and day out is the regime.
· Short hours of the night are not meant for rejuvenating your body with a sound sleep. They are for bricking up the pillars of academic success.
· Kids ask for it, and parents have it for them no matter it is a two-wheeler for Rs. 50,000/- at the age of fifteen or an ATM card at the age of sixteen. Kids should never have any cares and worries. They are to make the life of their parents worth looked at enviously by the rest of the world.
· When the kid rams this two wheeler against a speeding lorry and ends up in four legs, the parents prove themselves again to be able to do anything to their kid, either good or bad. Forget it if a kid fires a few bullets at another.
· Today’s parents keep their kids fed (up) with any junk stuff that has an English or alien string attached even if the kid is going to swoon in the school assembly queue or collapse to death in an examination hall as result of this unhealthy food habit.
· Sun, rain, wind and mist are the most unhealthy of natural ‘discomforts’ our kids are exposed to and our parents keep their kids cocooned in, and they grow like broiler chicken. If the power fails for a couple of hours, you will find them either dead or worth culling.
· Running, walking, jumping up or down and falling in fours and threes and getting bruised, climbing trees and poking some fun up there, swimming down or upstream, playing in the mud or splashing in a rain-fed puddle, or getting wet in the rain or going cold in a winter evening are again unimaginable.
· The mother raises the kid and the cleaner of the school bus places it in a seat. In the evening, the cleaner raises the kid, and places it on the stretched hands of the waiting mother. In between these two times our kids are made to pick up the basics of what we call ‘the cutting edge’.
· When kids grow like this, we cannot expect them to be running or climbing up trees or stairs. If you read in the dailies that ‘engineering student got washed way, drowned to death, went missing, or even bitten by a stray dog’, don’t be surprised.
· Our kids know how to make money out of moth, but they do not know how to keep their breath in when they go under water or go up on a tree when a stray dog chases them.
· And come vacation, our kids are the worst affected. There is nothing called going to natal family, visiting friends, engaging in any kind of country games, sleeping for a few more hours, preparing for a personal interest, why should I say more, speaking the native language or showing some inherent signs of misbehavior or mischief. They are all anti-kid and are brutally shunned.
· And many of our kids grow into rogues of some rare orders. A few of them make it to the best of professional order, and the rest come to be called executors of crime and precipitators of many criminal tendencies.
· Snatching ornaments from unsuspecting women on the road, engaging in organized crimes like quotation work, donning some political clout and become a rogue politician, dealing in drugs or driving away stolen cars and two wheelers or taking pride in the worst forms of asocial activities like mafias.
· Our god’s own country has already become a perfect breeding ground for this rare breed of kids meticulously raised to meet the most severe test conditions. Another feather on the cap of those parents who prove again and again that there is nothing that they cannot do for their parents.
Summer vacation is round the corner. Vacation class industry has already started buying column centimeters in all major Dailies. These centres are out to catch them young and offer them the rare Midas touch in them in the long run. Private school managements and their precariously protected teachers have started hovering around families to grab the latest arrivals; infants and toddlers for future bookings. And our omnipotent parents are raking up their heads as how to find a better institution this time of the year so that their kids would make the best of hay when it shines in the long run. Where are our poor kids and their killing childhood liberties and interests going to end up in? Smoke!!!!!!
It is really difficult to be a kid. There was a time when kids were asked to live their life dangerously. Those times have gone. Now they are asked to live in perpetual dangers. These dangers include the ones pitted against them by their own parents.
Tailpiece: Summer vacation is to be made pressure-free for kids of all ages, and any effort, concerted or obvious, to make these two months tough for them, either by parents or by institutions, should be curtailed. The word ‘vacation’ includes a “vacat” in it. It needs to be defined as ‘vacate our kids from all their academic actions’. In the meantime, we need to include a lesson in our kids’ early curriculum elaborating on their own rights, privileges and responsibilities. It is this poor consciousness that makes our kids mere tools that help their parents fit themselves in the milieu they live in.
No comments:
Post a Comment