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Life may be treacherous, unfair, impossible-to-fathom, meaningless-in-the-cosmic- scheme-of-things, but lo! One suddenly wants to do something about it. In minuscule and anonymous ways.

One is galvanised into action in spurts. Closet writers find that requisite spark of fatalistic madness needed to dash one’s thoughts off to newspapers, in the throes of that same clarion call. Life seems like an endless stream of circumstances that can be bettered. For the children, our own, yet not our own, those “sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself”.

The autowallah whose meter runs at neurotic speeds, needs to be reasoned with. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t want to hear you out. He was a kid once, and his mother probably fed him tuttus of mosaranna before he ran off to play with his friends. The “Swachcha Bengalooru” person who comes to collect your garbage, with sore-covered hands, needs to be outfitted properly by the government to mitigate the risk of disease, for similar reasons. A teacher who is spotted thrashing a child probably went to one of those nightmarish, box-like schools as a child where Maria Montessori and her “Era of the Child” were unheard off. Having fallen out of his state of oneness with the universe, he has now deteriorated into a helpless pawn of the gestalt, whose attention needs to be drawn patiently, but firmly, to his act of cruelty.

When one hears Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General denounce globalisation and consumerism, one is pinched and provoked, but one still wants to buy one’s kid a few, if not “every toy in the world”.

The implications of the education process, of the outsourcing of one’s child’s learning to schools and colleges, and their subsequent absorption as cogs into the social machine, confront one in all monstrosity. Yet, one cannot coddle the child in a world of one’s own making. After all, it takes an entire universe — with its complexity, beauty, order, disorder, inequalities, bewildering range of experiences and emotions, multiple layers of existence, rude awakenings, loneliness and friendships — to awaken, sustain and satisfy a child.

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