This year, November 14 was dedicated absolutely to the Bihar election results. Delhi to gulley, the various ramifications of the result, immediate as well as long-term, were the themes around which discussions and debates developed. Given such ambience, it was but normal that neither the birth centenary of Pandit Nehru nor the death centenary of Hegel got much mention.
Nehruji's birth centenary gets celebrated as the 'children's day'. One would like to argue that the tsunami of discussions centered around the election results and politics washed away that tiny island.
Why is it possible at all? Well, my submission is that there is hardly innocence left at all. Naïveté, that primitive stage of innocence, is almost invisible. Innocence is an entity that is marked by its absence currently.
Do not you believe me? Okay, let us begin with children. With mobiles in their tiny palms and the politics of reality inscribed there in the forms of wily and violent comics, innocence and naïveté wither away faster than the state in the Marxist ideology.
A little older, what do children watch? Horribly vicious serials wherein family relationships are mere politics in the worst possible way! Or the alternative is the 'Big Boss' types which teach hatred, malice, envy, jealousy masqueraded as normalcy!
Can innocence at all bloom in such a barren mindscape? Much worse are the dance competitions for children. A kid of five or six gyrates to the vulgarest songs. The young body is this sexualised beyond belief. What can such child pornography have to do with innocence?
Personally, I am absolutely against introducing dramatics or dance in to the lives of children till they grow up to be ten. Why so? Is that your question? Well, when you thus consciously teach a child to falsely feel an emotion, imitate through gestures a false feeling, such 'acting' breeds a false consciousness. You are training your own kid to pretend! Whither(ed) innocence?!?
The sizzling to this tasteless broth is the constant competitive fierceness fast (in all senses of the term) bred amongst kids. Within the familial space, vicious and cruel, especially due to its subtle proliferation, is its contamination which has a super fast spread everywhere, in schools, on the playground, for instance. Eternally, parents, highly ambitious, are in to such one-up-manship. As a result, children are in to very many activities taken up not for joy but to prove superiority of the parent's (mostly mother's, not to foget 'her' maternal family) upbringing.
Wither naïveté in such a scénario? Absolutely impossible is innocence because, by definition, innocence is freedom from any guilt. Well, guilt is the hallmark for childhood activities today, be it family, be it recreation, be it education. The dirge for the lost innocence is tough to sing. Hence this note of condolence for an era long lost wherein a child, not pushed, instead allowed to be innocent, was not a performing poppet!
Pratima@Nuclear and/or single parent family would not alone be the culprit, I suppose. Whatever be the causes, the resulting knowing cynicism on the perenially pretending young faces is pathetic!
Quote of the day: "I have always been fascinated," argued Clint Eastwood, "with the stealing of innocence. It is the most heinous crime, and certainly a capital crime, if there is any."
Word of the day: sanctimonious. The word refers to pretending to be superior to others by adding a moral veneer to lowly, despicable motives.
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