As a child growing up in Delhi, I was a real hellion. One of only three girls in a group that had five boys, there wasn’t a tree that I couldn’t and wouldn’t climb. Pithu and gulli-danda were favourite games. Those were halcyon days, when a child could marvel at dancing bears, or scream with fear at the snake-charmer, gawk at the hijdas, or buy “ber” from the itinerant seller of goods.
Today, my grandkids love their iPads and their iPods. Wise parenting has placed parameters on their activities. Yet I fear for them and wonder what kind of world we are leaving for our young children. The recent Parkland, Florida shooting — which, sadly, is only one of the many that have taken place in the U.S. in recent years — forces a parent or a grandparent to consider the forces which today are steering kids into totally unacceptable realms of behaviour.
Was a time when children met and played together, had fun with other kids, fought one another occasionally, and learned the important skills of social interaction and giving and sharing. In the marginal arenas of classrooms they acquire the skills that, as adults, make them savvy in a competitive world.
The most powerful arena of learning was, is, and always will be, the home. Parents shape and mould the character of their children through various means. Admonishment is not usually a viable tool, though it has its own merits. It is mostly through the immense power of example that they set the stage for the pupa to emerge in full glory.
Gone are the days of the joint family, where a vast conglomeration of aunts and uncles, besides parents, guided the steps of these fledgling citizens. We now have the insular modules where both parents work, the children are left to their own devices, and the family meets for dinner once a day. Many parents feel an obsessive desire to shower on their children what they feel they missed out on, in their own childhood. So, they come to school laden with iPods, iPads, cell phones, and even sometimes guns.
A wrong turn
Where have we taken a wrong turn? In a country where education is given a back seat, all that we may otherwise learn becomes redundant. Education does not consist just of book-learning; it is the sum total of knowledge acquired from the wisdom of those around us, and experiences that we have in the process of larval development.
Recently a so-called model splashed a photo on the cover of a Malayalam magazine showing her ‘breast-feeding’ a baby: it is another matter that she is neither married, nor was the child hers. Even in the Western world, women in general modestly cover themselves when nursing their babies.
The attempt to give that excellent message in terms of exhibitionism did nothing but raise a storm of controversy. It seems somewhere along the way we have lost a sense of propriety and instead wallow in an aura gained through notoriety.
It has become de rigeur to be different, bold, do some drugs, flout authority, flay established tenets and screech through the elemental frontage of adulthood. Should we not stop to think that we have chosen the path to our own destruction?
A 77-year-old grandmother,
the author lives in Illinois. gmindu@gmail.com
