My five-year-old had a nasty fall last week, hurt herself so bad that the gushing blood from her nose refused to stop. The incident occurred in her dance class—and whilst she was being rushed to the nearest hospital, I was stranded in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Trying to contain overriding anxiety at a head injury and utter frustration at the state of roads/traffic and cursing the malaise of authorities in my mad dash from office to hospital, I lived what I believed was every parent’s worst nightmare — not being with your child in his/her hour of need and fear. The commute from office to home can stretch to an hour in peak traffic and with the blocks and bottlenecks along the way, depending on what time it is, longer.
Later, after I had reached her, and tackled one of the longest evenings of my life, two things came to me. The first: How it can sometimes be, that despite your best intentions and greatest care, your little one can still get hurt. And one can only do one’s best, under ordinary circumstances — an accident, a fall — to help and heal. But what of extraordinary circumstances? Those that spring from political or social considerations, that warrant a child to be prepared for something perhaps beyond comprehension or foresight. Such that every parent’s worst nightmare might play out on a scale magnified, so as to be unbearable. I’m referring to the latest headlines which point to children/young adults increasingly being used as tools, pawns in politically or socially motivated agendas. Like the recent, grievous case of the student from Pune, shot in Britain at point blank range, an apparently socially motivated act, a race crime. As parents, when we send our kids away — to institutes, to places far away or close by — we hope and pray for safety, try to guess and provide every security they might possibly need. Yet, how could any parent have foreseen so grievous a circumstance (and then get to know of the same, on such a horrifyingly casual tool, a social networking site)?
If supposed ‘safe’ places allow for such an instance, can the picture be better for young ones in conflicted countries? In Afghanistan, international reports cite children as young as nine, apparently being recruited as suicide bombers by the Taliban, ostensibly to blow up NATO targets. They are apparently brainwashed and trained and lied to, to get them to aid insurgencies, reports say. How to even imagine the agonies of the parents and their little ones coerced/brainwashed into such horror?
There are atrocities against young ones that are borne of extraordinary circumstances, politically or socially motivated agendas. And then there are atrocities that are common place, everyday ones, which are not just against little ones, but all those in need of timely assistance, often denied, only because one could not attend quickly enough. Which brings me to the second observation that terrible day: our weakening infrastructure when it comes to basics like travel, traffic, dug-up roads. How many anxious city parents/kin have burned in impatience and despair at congested roads praying they’ll make it in time during emergencies? As the city goes to polls, perhaps what we must keep in mind while deciding civic representatives, are their policies on fixing them here and the immediate, rather than intangibles.
Comments