1. Middle-class parenting dilemma: What should we learn and what should we unlearn? | 2. It’s a new kind of relationship- Just Like it!

Many urban parents in India are very anxious about their kids’ studies, and so am I. Most of us primarily go through similar stages of experiments as shown below:

Stage 1: Initially we start by assuming that we should not pressure our kids to study and give them a free hand to relax and learn. We then start vilifying other parents who send their kids to school specializing in academics. It is the stage when we exclaim with pride, “Oh no, I don’t want my kid to go through such a burnout. My kid can’t take it!”

Stage 2: After several years on stage -1 we then start comparing the academic performance of our kid with the others. We slowly start to realize that our kids are performing poorly in academics in comparison to those we mocked! Here comes the backlash of our ideology against the outcome we see in front of our eyes! We are a bit devastated and feel like a sore loser! And then we behave like a lion humiliated and retracting from an earlier ideological standpoint!

Stage 3: From our so-called failures we now energize our efforts to win back the lost ground and compete with the next-door kid! So, moving back to academics and moving back to the same “rigorous rote learning” scheme of things without any reconciliation effort or exploration!

Overall in these stages, aren’t we putting our own ambition above all and trying to earn some brownie points by shooting off our kid’s shoulder?

The most undemocratic, unreasonable, and sad part of this whole process is that there is no conversation of sorts with the kid, with any educational experts or some child specialists! More sadly there are not many efforts from us to explore in educating ourselves on the very concept called Education! No, we even go one step further in owning the child’s whole existence just because we gave birth to her/him! We give ourselves all sorts of certificates to be an educationist, child specialist, or whatnot! Things go totally out of hand when we give a free hand to all kinds of relations & friends to interfere in our child’s growth and upbringing!

Honestly speaking, in this whole experiment, two things that get grossly misunderstood are Education and Parenting! We rarely put any effort whatsoever into understanding the very concepts, unlearning our ignorance, and even safeguarding our little ones from all the chaos that gets into their life like an average parent! And behaving like every other average parent (repeating the same mistakes) doesn’t yield extraordinary results for sure! With such a degree of insensitivity & ignorance we as parents ultimately fail our kids! Over time as a parent, we lose their trust, love, and respect! And no one is happy at the end! Thanks for reading @rakshitmca

Dedication: This article is dedicated to people like Dr. Bhooshan Shukla, social scientist Dipankar Gupta, etc. for writing on topics that make our society a better place to live!

2. It’s a new kind of relationship- Just Like it!

After mobile phones became common and we started living our lives in the virtual world, called Social Media (SM), our lives started getting reshaped around the Likes or Optics(dikhava) kind of value system! On the occasion of Birth, Marriage, or even Death of a loved one, we are just sharing the updates in SM ONLY, as if the virtual people from SM would commemorate(पुण्यस्मरण) such important occasions right with us!

Even if someone has done nothing substantially loving, caring, and moving, for us, we, like to care for such virtual People of Similar Land! We wait for their daily updates like a hyena looking for the daily catch!

On the contrary, if someone doesn’t belong to this People of Similar Land, we would rarely have time to socialize with these Real and Meaningful people! S/he was there when we needed help, support, or affection; the only thing they might not be doing is Optics(dikhava)!

Ok, but why am I making a fuzz out of this(Baat ka batangad banana)?

There is a serious problem with such a relationship that is built around the weight of Likes or Optics! These are all virtual, mostly fake or meaningless! At the end of the day, such habits are making us shackled to the whims of other people’s Virtual Wishes! More Likes Happier, Sad otherwise!

And when we are in real need of someone to talk, console, or need help to sort out something critical, we find these Virtually Awesome People, to be Uncaring, Cold-hearted, and Extremely Busy for every damn thing!

So, from our Busy for Nothing Life, we should spare some time out to sit and introspect, who are those people really took care of us when we were unwell in an unknown city(!), who were those people really helped us when we were stuck on a terrible phase, who were those people showered all they had, when we needed some emotional or monitory help!

Please note that these Beautiful people are giving up hope to make this society a wonderful & caring place, as they find us so much occupied with our Cosmetic world of Optics! And do remember, with their giving up, they have nothing much to lose but in a longer time, it’s we who would be the loser!

So, it’s not that we don’t socialize in SM! We shouldn’t also waste our opportunity and start looking for all those lovely people, who were there for us in our time of need and prayed for your Success! Thank you!

Context: This blog is written in the context of some real stories that touched me over the last few years:

A person shared in SM that he wished one of his friends for his birthday on Facebook but ended up discovering that his friend was already dead!
One of our close friends got a baby boy and we got to know about that only after a few weeks when we called them to check on the same. His wife proudly informed us that she had already informed everyone it seems. As we did not get any such message/call, we inquired further. Then she said that it was updated in WhatsApp status!
My close friend’s marriage was fixed after a lot of struggle, as happens in the case of love marriages. And the unfunny part was that every other day, he was getting confronted by close friends about why didn’t he share this beautiful news directly instead of finding it in some random Facebook feeds!
The birthday of my close friend’s wife falls just one day before my wife’s birthday. We wish her every time. But surprisingly, they have never reciprocated the same!