CHILD'S PLAY

It’s going to be exactly two months, and I haven’t slept a wink. No, I am not woken up by daunting images of the ruthless blasts….I am already awake. I can hear the child wailing. It began as a whimper a few decades ago but has progressed to a deafening howl that just doesn’t let me sleep. I can hear him, and I don’t understand how no one else has heard him yet.

The blasts were a tantrum- a deadly tantrum. His wishes were left unfulfilled. While we ran around to gather the toys that scattered in the train compartments, we forgot that it’s a price we paid for raising the child the way we did. The way we are still doing…

A senior bureaucrat, a very intelligent one at that once told me, how the child we ignored has now spiraled into an existence that we all cannot afford to ignore. The market is devoid of pacifiers, they have all run out of stock. How do we pacify our child now?

When the child stared his whimpers, he was complaining. He thought we were at fault. We said to ourselves, “What does a little child know about what is good or the bad.” Yes, unfortunately, he didn’t know and we never told him. He grew up with his notions, very staunch notions. A thin demarcation existed between what we adults call ‘terror’ and what the child called ‘tantrum.’ He throws his tantrums, oblivious of the fact that tantrums have never got a child his favourite play, never will.

Today, the psyche of the world has become synonymous with that of America post the 9/11 bombings. Fighting ‘tantrums,’ is no longer a matter of choice but a matter of necessity for us ‘adults.’ So are we doing a good job of it? Did we really have to end up fighting, or could we have helped our children? We failed as adults and now what do we have here?
An adult and a child- and a huge generation gap between them.