Gaurav's Blog

The difficulty of being a good father

 

 

Picture this: You jump a traffic signal on your 2-wheeler. Nobody stops you, nobody whistles you down, and there are no cameras to have clicked your number plate for traffic violation. Nobody that matters really has seen it, except your son riding pillion, who, in his 6th year, is old to understand that perhaps something wasn't quite right, but not old enough to make the connection between breaking a simple traffic rule and the idea of morality, of fairness, and I suspect many adults will have difficulty making the connection themselves.   

What would you do thereafter? I have cursed myself many times for rushing through a signal that I could see had been green for quite a while, approaching it from afar. Yet, instead of slowing down, I decided to press on at breakneck speed, actually accelerating to get through it before a glimpse of crimson was visible, comfortable in the thought that there will be a momentary pause, a middle ground, a window between the light turning red from green that conceals the intentions of the driver, diminishing the difference between a real traffic offender from one who merely misjudged the distance.

Now, there are a thousand silly things in daily life that I curse myself for -sometimes silently, sometimes aloud- small promises that I really shouldn't have broken, words that I shouldn't have uttered but I never consciously considered the effects of these small wrongs on those around me, especially my children. Until, I saw the protagonist, the main character of the movie, Ferrari Ki Sawari- a young father, with son in tow, who is an upright man & decides to pay the traffic fine voluntarily, even though no one really saw him breaking the traffic signal except his own son.

You think that the director makes a great point-nothing can be more important than demonstrating the right from wrong to your kids. But it is impossible to not go through a conflicting emotion at this point in the movie, a nagging feeling of whether one can really survive this world being that upright. Would you really pay a traffic fine voluntarily? Have you? Ever?

From then on, a barrage of questions, of matters however small have haunted me- There is a cloud, a grey area, a gap between honesty and the extent of its practice in daily life that bothers me. It is perhaps easy to teach the idea of differentiating the right from wrong to your kids.  But honesty, goodness, morality are all absolute values, there is no middle ground. Their practice in daily life is anything but.

I watched my son at the playground with other kids. On his first day, he kept pleading with the other kids to slow down the merry-go- round so he could step on it, but despite his many pleas and requests, they never did. Exasperated, he decided to withdraw and play on the swing. Next day, it was the same story again and since I decided to not intervene, this kept happening for days at end, until one day, an older kid, whom my son had befriended, stepped in with a stick in hand and forced the other kids to stop. The lesson was crystal clear to my son. It wasn't clear to me. Is there value anymore in being polite or do I teach him to be aggressive like everyone else, to survive in the world we live in? More importantly, will he be able to distinguish which situation requires a stick to be used?

At school, kids are taught to always cross the road using the designated Zebra crossing- so he questioned me one day when we awkwardly leapt across the busy road at Bangalore. How must one teach a kid to cross roads using Zebra crossings when none exist? These are not insignificant things- even a child can understand the contradictions between what is being taught and what is actually being practiced. It won't be long when he learns to disregard what is taught and does what he sees others doing without understanding why there is a difference. 

And here's the larger issue- our schools were so steeped in high idealism-ideas of Satyagraha and ahimsa that they never prepared us for how that idealism must be practiced in a world that is far from ideal. No teacher said that the world is imperfect so you may learn these principles but when it comes to using them, you will only be able to apply them in half measures!

When we graduated, we were like Ranbir Kapoor's character in Rocket Singh- naïve, idealistic and completely unprepared for the pitfalls of the working world, stuffing complaint boxes with letters against the corrupt, hoping the world would change for the better. 

So, I often ask myself- why must I teach my kid about a rule if he is going to later learn it to become a handicap?

Must I insist that he learns about morals, if he is going to be humiliated because of those morals later on in life? 

Must I teach him about the real world that is cruel and crushing or should I leave him to be disillusioned on his own later on?  

Should I teach him to play or should I teach him to win?

Should I teach him to be Maryada-Purushottam or should I teach him to be Mayavi?