Indian Writing

A fourteen-year old boy in Calcutta dies of internal injuries after being beaten by his father during TT practice.

A Class VII student is forced to stand in class every day for three months. He spends his six hours at school standing through the day, in addition to the one-kilometre walk from home and back.

Too early in life, children are under pressure to get into the right playschools…

Barry O’Brien writes a letter to children:

My mother made it a point to declare to anyone remotely close to the family what she wanted her three sons to be: one should join the armed forces to save the country; one should become a priest, to save the soul; and one a doctor, to save the body. Every time she said it, she made sure that the three of us were within hearing distance. It wasn’t just a dream; she made it her mission and spent countless hours on her prayer-bones in our local parish. What she didn’t do was make my father a co-conspirator, force her plans down our throats, and make us live her dream.

Today, when she looks around and sees that, professionally, none of her sons came remotely close to fulfilling her dream, I am sure she is not disheartened, or, worse still, completely shattered. She seems very happy that as parents, they allowed us to be ourselves. That’s what made us happy; and what made us happy, made them happy.

My young friends, you will be pleased to know that there were, are and always will be many parents like mine. But the sad truth is that there are so many parents these days who have chosen the wrong four-letter word to be the centre-point of their relationship with their children: fear…

As the years roll on, the ‘my-beta-will-bat-like-Sachin-and-my-beti-will-play-like-Sania’ syndrome takes over. For parents who have dreams of an indoor nature, it’s the ‘my-child-is-an-Einstein’ syndrome that fills their empty minds. It’s about time we, as parents, realized that our children are all little champs, as precious as Sachin, Sania or Einstein were to their parents. It’s about time we realized that our children are all special, and specially good at something; and that ‘something’ isn’t always what we want them to be good at; but it’s that ‘something’, and that ‘something’ only, that will keep them happy and contented throughout their lives.