The times, they are a-changing, and it’s good to rebel

My eldest leaves India tomorrow. Not because of corruption or the agitation against corruption, but to study abroad. Like many others she’s fascinated by the idea of living abroad (despite the Western world’s recession during the next few years); she’s leaving also because our colleges are by and large mediocre, barring a few where entrance happens only if you have an impossibly high cut-off score or if you’re the child of a pushy newspaper Editor-in-Chief. Higher education in the US remains the best in the world despite the proliferation of sub-standard colleges offering ridiculous courses. Most would probably agree that my Mrinalini has made the right choice towards building a career and a life that she can be proud of.

And though there is nothing novel in the fact of a daughter leaving home, it’s still a heart-wrenching experience. She’s never coming back except to visit, though she’ll probably skype with her mother nightly. I can’t give her any advice because she’s exactly like me in that she listens to no one. I don’t worry about the choices she’ll make — academically or career-wise — because she’s far smarter than I am. And unlike my parent’s generation, the thought that she might meet and marry someone who is different does not bother me. (My mother might object, but by now even she has realised that Mrinalini is an unstoppable force of nature.)

Still, it’s difficult to reconcile these thoughts with the image still fresh in my mind of the purple-headed baby which one early winter evening popped out of my wife in a South Delhi nursing home. Mrinalini was forever wide-eyed with curiosity, and her head constantly turned from side to side as if she constantly needed a 360-degree view of reality as it unfolded around her; she was always reluctant to sleep, perhaps afraid that she might miss out on the action. I certainly hope she henceforth devotes her late nights to her textbooks.

Most of Mrinalini’s teenaged years were spent in Chennai, a place that really brings out the rebel in some people. Some of her prissier schoolteachers were constantly at odds with her, perhaps because she was a Delhi girl transplanted to a conservative town; and despite her good marks they always complained about her wild ways, to the point where my wife refused to meet any of Mrinalini’s teachers and delegated that thankless job to me. I was never unhappy about my daughter’s rebelliousness; it’s a good default position for any citizen to take, questioning authority, questioning society, and questioning existing paradigms of knowledge. There’s more life in a rebel than there is in a cow.

You’re perhaps wondering how it is that I dare put all this in the public domain. The fact of the matter is that none of my three children read newspapers even though my life has been devoted to newspapers. I don’t blame the younger ones because even I didn’t start seriously reading newspapers until university. And it isn’t as if they aren’t fond of reading: each has a bookshelf, Mrinalini’s being partial to the mind-bending hipster Neil Gaiman.  It’s a sign of the times: she gets all her information from the internet (yes, though my column is on our website I don’t think it’s of much interest to her). So while global media organisations and corporate executives scratch their heads and ponder the future of the newspaper, I see it before my eyes in my own house.

Although Mrinalini does not read newspapers (not even the Mumbai behemoth whose sole purpose is to encourage women like her to spend, spend, spend), she does know about a man named Anna Hazare. This does not mean that youngsters like her who do not read well-pondered edit pieces in self-serious newspapers have incomplete knowledge about the proper functioning of a Constitutional democracy; it also does not mean that going for a protest-picnic after following intense online debate about a man who’s finally taking corruption head-on is the only correct way. It does, however, mean that public discourse is in the middle of a long, tectonic change; that class-composition of our society is in the middle of a long, tectonic change; that democracy itself is in the middle of a long, tectonic change; and finally, that the world as a whole is, well, you get the idea.

Of course, the biggest sign that the times are a-changing would be if Mrinalini, after studying and living abroad, decided that India is the new El Dorado and a place worth returning to in order to make a life. That would not seem such a bizarre choice as it might have 25 years ago. Most of all, it would be her choice, a choice that earlier generations did not have. And wherever she goes, whatever she chooses to do, in my mind she will always be the baby who, having just learned to walk, could be heard running about exploring the house, her tiny feet pattering on the mosaic floor.

— The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai