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...

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...