Overlooked though
No matter how much we gift-wrap our painfully veined, overhanging existence, the bowdlerized covering slips off sporadically when we least expect it; from the time when the bundled headlines goggle at us from behind our cups of morning coffee, to the moment when we stop at a traffic signal and spot hands reaching out like overextended vines to the car door handle. To the countless times when we walked past the screams that writhed from a cop station. To all those moments when we ignored the stink at the nearest railway platform and concentrated instead, sickeningly, to the colour of glittering evasive conversation.
To all those times when we encountered the intangible frailty of childhood and knocked it around the gasping walls of our tangible nerve drums. When we forgot to pen down that eternal written utterance that describes childhood in the meekest way possible, ‘Children come in all shapes and sizes.’ For if there is an incisive way of describing the typical Indian childhood, this could be it. Our children often best reflect our pungent ignorant chasm in a way nothing else can. They reflect our lethargic way of holding on to unfulfilled promises. They reflect our misery in the most guileless manner. They reflect the unvarnished blemishes that rutted our past. But they also reflect our hope and our future.
One has to only look around and find that the impressionistic existence of the Indian child is not limited within the blooming tinge of classroom chaos. It is not always encompassed within the boundless walls of nesting protection. It does not always hatch under the watch of superimposing maternity. That for some children the most inordinate tests do not concern the basic principles of arithmetic, but the exceedingly testing borderlines of survival. That India accounts for nearly 400,000 street children in the world. That 53% of Indian children face some form of sexual abuse. That not all parents nurture bodies and cultivate souls. That some cops abuse and some parents abandon. That for some children, the journey to a day’s end consists of sailing through a cluttered ocean of earnings and self-protection. That sometimes, acts and laws ignore the sea of juvenile vulnerability that chokes our streets with their mindless susceptibility but jump at the opportunity to protect a minor rapist. That the Right to Education Act might as well be a plastered chapter from an inundating fairytale.
Philippe Ariès wrote in his book ‘Centuries of Childhood’ that childhood as a concept was contrived and created by society, a society consisting of adults in their incessant obsession to label all things around them. However one can’t disagree that childhood is a phase set apart by adulthood, not by the naivety of its members who are unable to entwine the meanings of their immediate reality, but by the sheer pliability and wetness of their minds, eager to absorb the prints before they are thrust and hardened to become gravelly adult concepts. One can’t deny that the earliest dimmed snapshots of our existence stay with us for the longest times; they often flicker in the depths of our thoughts and float through our actions. And for those who believe that children are people who are unable to orchestrate their perceptions are clearly deprived of the mechanics of that world; a world where every essence and fragrance is noted and gushed down unswervingly.
Perhaps because of the pristine pungency of that world that most adults can’t grasp, we still haven’t found a way to deal with our children. We stuff our lives and our streets and our schools and our homes with them but we forget to gape meaningfully at their enigmatic subsistence. We build them towers of playthings and wide open schools but only end up washing their colour by the lusterless knolls of our unquestionable teachings. We bind and fold them every time they fall but disregard the cracks that those falls sometimes cause. We rush at the opportunity to hold them up like embellished trophies but obliterate the fact that their wonders are not conquests that we might degrade by the utter worthlessness of forced display.
For every child stifled by the tenuous walls of adult constructs, there are thousands more who are jostled forth, unprepared, into the adult battlefields. Scrambling with wretched adult conjectures such as marriage, legality, work permits, abuse and strife. For if India is the country with the highest birth rate it is also the country where one third of all child brides live. If India is a country where education for every child below the age of fourteen is considered mandatory, it is also the country where child marriages are not always void. If India is country where childlessness is looked upon as no less than a venereal disease, it is also the country where children are overlooked probably every moment of their lives, irrespective of where they come from.
Childhood is not a phase; it is not a transitory cognitive junction or an extension of our lives. But often childhood is our despicably failed efforts to look at our past and the frightening prospects of our immediate future. Childhood is the pervasive fragrance of our hopes and our tomorrows. Childhood is the wet slab of slate that absorbs the quintessence of every word scribbled over it. Childhood is perhaps, the shattered spring of glass that reflects our only optimism of reconstructing a world devastated by the ravaged manacles of our past.