The end of innocence

THIS WAS SUPPOSED to be a much more light-hearted column telling you about my experiences in school "" almost a decade-and-a-half after I quit it "" thanks to my daughter joining playschool lately.

But what are stern school principals and a system that begins its indoctrination with an insistence on socks-and-shoes, middle of summer, compared to tottering governments, exploding caste, class and religious cauldrons and a nation that gives you a distinct sense of imploding if you pick up the day's newspaper and just scan the headlines?

There's all manner of violence afoot "" within the home and on the streets, sometimes politically egged-on, sometimes unintentional, but a lot of times because of the sheer depravity, ruthlessness and callousness that has come to mark us as a people of an India in churn.

The nature of evil has been an overriding concern for humanity down the ages. But whether you believe in apples and serpents; in Humanistic notions that the nature of man is essentially divine or in baser Freudian motives governing all our actions, childhood has always been regarded in much of our culture and thought as a time of relative innocence.

Whatever Freud and his followers may have had to say, you only have to look at the very young to realise how unblemished their world can be. But "can be" and "is" are different things. And in India today, possibilities are perhaps the only thing we can celebrate.

The most worrying aspect of our society today is the violence against and by the young. If female foeticide is closer home than most of us middle-class, educated people would like to believe, other horror stories are not too far either: schoolchildren are brutally beaten up by teachers in the name of discipline, classmates are killed because someone wants an extra holiday and, of course, all of us upwardly mobile types trying to give the best to our children, are secretly shuddering at the murder of the Mumbai teen killed by "friends" he met on Orkut for his flashy lifestyle. What has set such horrors on this celebrated state of innocence?

One obvious argument is that children can't escape from a society whose products they are. And if we, as a nation, are producing more and more people who take to crime more and more easily, the young too must suffer.

But while terrible crimes get highlighted, middle India can hardly take the moral ground and say that such depravities are outside its domain "" committed sometimes against it but never by its own. We "" or our children"" may hopefully never kill anyone but there is plenty of quieter violence to be found inside our very homes. Like domestic violence against women that the genteel like to keep quiet about, there are other dysfunctions on the rise and not necessarily by way of physical abuse.

Instead, think of all the spoilt brats you know: do you merely laugh at their antics? Or fantasise about pinching them on the sly? But do you ever think that such kids need to be dealt with more seriously? Talk to any shrink in the metros and s/he will narrate a dozen "cases" where kids are brought in for counselling after routinely hitting out (physically) at grandparents or younger siblings; essentially weaker kin.

For each of these, there are many other cases that are not reported because the recipient of such violence is not in a position to complain "" say, a maid or the household staff. Now, where does such deviant behaviour come from in supposedly "normal" families?

Apart from taking their cues from aggressive parents, is it because we tend to give in too much, too many times and without inculcating a sense of responsibility to the child, trying to compensate for time and attention? This is a common take from psychologists. I would tend to agree "" which brings us back to the nature of "bad apples". Evil begets evil, is our common understanding. But obviously too much indulgence does that too.