Skip to main content

Children and Crime


When children rush in where adults fear to tread, there is cause for concern.  Children are committing suicide for reasons as silly as being scolded by parents or teachers.  Children are committing crimes which adults would find repulsive.  Why is innocence fleeing from children?

Germaine Greer described the library as “a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”  The library is a treasure house of knowledge and information.  The library brings to you heroes and villains, notions and perversions, the saint and the sinner.  The library opens your inner eye and reveals the hidden secrets of the world.  While knowledge is a priceless treasure, it is also potential terror.  That is why the biblical God asked Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of knowledge. 

Today children are exposed to a tremendous lot of information which most of them are not able to handle effectively.  The mobile phone with internet connection, the social media and the television expose children to worlds they are not able to comprehend and cope with.  They enter the adult world before they are even able to grasp the basic rules of that world.  They are confounded by the monstrous chiaroscuro of that world.  Consequently they fumble with the shadows and metamorphose into shadows eventually.  Childhood is a shadow game today, much like life in Christine Feehan’s novel Shadow Game.

Is childhood lost altogether?  I don’t think so.  There are still many children who feel loved and cared for by parents and significant others.  Such feelings of security are the only things that can save childhood.  Providing those feelings, creating such an environment, is the duty of the adults.  The adults are too busy, however, it seems, with too many other things.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 197: #crimeinchildren



Comments

  1. Hmm...Loved the quote of Germaine in the context. Knowledge is indeed power but not everybody is capable of handling power.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Especially children when it comes to knowledge they can't digest.

      Delete
  2. Agree with it! The education system too is playing a pivotal role in this transformation...it used to be quite a simple life earlier.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Commercialisation of education brought in too many textbooks, projects and many other things. That too is a serious problem.

      Delete
  3. True sir,We need change in education system

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The society also can play a positive role in the process.

      Delete
  4. Very logical writing covering up the the effect of digitization and child's psychology.
    Parents, now a days must be more careful about their children.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A lot of care, in fact. They are more in need of guidance today than ever in spite of the plethora of information they have.

      Delete
  5. As you said, the problem is in the upbringing. Technology, information overflow, movies etc. are mere tools. They can never be blamed. A child should be taught to walk before run, and with no one to teach it, they stumble on to the unfiltered rays of knowledge and myths

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Too much to handle and no one to guide efficiently.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...