Month: November 2010

[This is an email response to this article, which I thought I should publish]

Hi sir,

I’m 17, in twelfth standard. My girlfriend – who’s not exactly my girlfriend because she’s always responded negatively to my “I love you”s – liked your article in The Hindu (Generation Y: where is it headed for?, Nov 13, 2010) . That’s why I read it.

AND YOU’RE BANG ON ABOUT WHAT YOU SAID

If growing up consisted of mental, physical, emotional and spiritual growth; growing up has accelerated, but not all the aspects of it. There’s sudden physical growth from the steroid injected chicken we eat everyday. And mental growth, thanks to the immense curriculum. The television and the loads of cheap fiction that’s available has seemed to have incorporated all kinds of intense emotions into our everyday lives. And unfortunately only 2 magazines among the hundreds of magazines and weeklies I know has ever published an article about “Emotional Intelligence”. Let alone spirituality; which’s being looked upon as a post-retirement occupation.

I’m a biology student and can’t go without speaking some science.

Mirror-neurons: I see someone doing something, my mirror neurons have already done that a thousand times in my brain. And what if I’m seeing (or more vividly, reading) all kinds of emotional moments (ranging from love through sex to violence) ? They’re rewiring our mental make-up. Making us want to experiment.

We’ve all always remained curious, about everything. Right from birth we looked at others to learn. We assimilated knowledge by looking around.
Personally, I was from my very early childhood exposed to the right things at the right times. I read children’s magazines till 6. Then science magazines for children. I saw Disney’s Mickey Mouse cartoons. My dad (who’s a doctor) used to take me for morning walks and tell me stories. He set up my morals and values. And he also introduced me to spirituality. And by the time I was 13 I had been influenced a big lot by Mahatma Gandhi.
In fact, my early childhood set the stage for me to grow up on my own.
And now I believe I’m strong enough to lead a successful life.

But I was very fortunate.

I don’t know into what little monsters will children who are exposed to nothing but rubbish from their infancy evolve into by the time they’re 10, or 20.
Yeah, you know. That’s what you wrote in your article.

The media have gone awry. There’s no way we can disinfect them.

But there’s one seemingly simple, but practically doubtable solution: good-parenting.
Parents can always decide what we’re exposed to (even in the internet). They can influence our values. They can mold our personalities before anyone even begins to notice us. They can let us prepare for life without getting injured.

Answer: Parental supervision is critical.

And when parents fail, children magnify.

(For good parents we need good grand parents, and so on. This cannot happen. So, we should somehow make our parents good. Education can help. So can media. But media isn’t helping, except for some lonely Aakash Mehrotra’s. And education isn’t proper. So we need some intelligent people to re-evaluate the goals of our school boards and media. But nobody is motivated enough. The government, the least. People who vote, even lesser. We need a Messiah. And ironically, it has to come from Generation Y)

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Have a blissful life,
ASD