Childhood

They say that childhood is the best phase of one’s life. I sigh. And then I laugh. I wish I could laugh raucously. But my voice was snuffed out long ago. By the conservatism of the family. By the ignorance of the religious people who controlled the family. By educators who were puppets of the system fabricated by religion mostly and ignorant but self-important politicians for the rest.

I laugh even if you can’t hear the sound of my laughter. You can’t hear the raucousness of my laughter because I have been civilised by the same system that smothered my childhood with soft tales about heaven and hell, about gods and devils, about the non sequiturs of life which were projected as great.

I lost my childhood in the 1960s. My childhood belonged to a period of profound social, cultural and political change. All over the world.

But global changes took time to reach my village in Kerala, India.

India was going through severe crises when I was struggling to grow up in a country where 1 in 4 children did not survive beyond the age of 5. I’m really not sure whether I would have been better off being the one among those five. If existence is agony, as the Enlightened Buddha asserted… Well, the real tragedy of life is that it strives on and on.

Even though the global changes didn’t reach my village in those days, the impacts did. A little later, though, naturally. I still remember the effect of the Hippie Movement and the rebelliousness of the youth of Kerala in the 1970s. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Woodstock were the icons in the cities. I was lucky to be in a Catholic seminary in those days and hence listen to the Western music of the times.

1960s. My childhood. Here’s a hindsight. The Cold War dominated international relations. The two global superpowers, the USA and the USSR, fought a phantasmagorical war with each other trying to prove each country’s superiority. They were reaching for the moon too while trying to conquer more pieces of the earth just like Israel and China are doing today.

India was struggling with poverty when the superpowers were reaching out to the moon. The superpowers did extend help to India. The Green Revolution was one of the outcomes. I didn’t starve to death because I was fortunate enough to have been born in a family that had a lot of land. But I still remember the poverty that prevailed all around me killing children as well as adults.

It took me many more years to learn that those poor dying children belonged to an unjust system that had been created long ago by some people who called themselves the high castes. I learnt also about people like B R Ambedkar who was destined to rise from the slush of an untouchable caste to the ranks of the destiny-makers.

My childhood was a period of a lot of social unrest and changes. There were the Marxists too whom the superpower America hated. I remember the extremist Marxists called Naxalites spreading terror in my distant neighbourhoods and how my parents were worried about our safety. That is the only instance recorded in my memory about my parents’ concern for their children’s safety. Maybe, they were more concerned about the safety of their lands which could have been claimed by the Naxalites at any time. I never thought that my parents really loved their children, ten of them. As a character in one of Thomas Hardy’s novels [Jude the Obscure] put it, “We were too menny.”

But we all survived. In spite of the politicians who succeeded Jawaharlal Nehru.

I grew up learning what Nehru was doing for the country. The five-year plans. The resultant heavy industries like Hindustan Steel Ltd and Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. Industrial cities like Bhilai, Durgapur, Rourkela. Hydroelectric dams like Bhakra Nangal, Hirakud, Nagarjuna Sagar. Thermal projects like the Bokaro Power Station. The extensions of railways, highways and seaports. Irrigation projects and the Green Revolution. Agricultural research institutions. IITs. Space and Atomic Research. CSIR. Universities and Medical Colleges including AIIMS. Urban Planning…

I grew up seeing India grow up under Nehru’s vision into a secular, scientific, technological country. 

My childhood wasn’t a particularly happy one. But it witnessed a lot of growth. A lot of genuine growth. A lot of genuine leaders. A lot of genuine common people.

Where has all that authenticity gone today? Why have we become a nation of fakes? A world of fakes? Though my childhood wasn’t a happy period, it was much better morally. That’s my memory. 

The earliest photo of my childhood in my collection

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter BlogHop. #BlogchatterBlogHop