I get bullied at school and can’t say this to anyone. I’m very scared to talk back to them. What do I do? Nervous and confused.” (Name withheld by me). Age 13 years.
I reply: “Don’t panic. You have to tell your parents about it. Tell them to come to school and talk to the principal and class teacher.”
She replies: “I don’t want my parents to know because they are too busy anyway, and I will get more bullied, or maybe beaten up at school if I complain. Please, is there any other way out?”
Sure there is. Let us change the way we look at education. Let us kick out all insensitive school principals. Let us identify bullies and boot them out. Let us tell parents to look at their kids carefully when they come back from school, it can reveal volumes about everything the child cannot talk about. And let us try and “not make” the next generation as hypocritical and insensitive as we have become.
What advice do I give this child? It breaks my heart to know there is someone who has asked me a burning question, which I cannot answer properly. What kind of education system is this? A 13-year-old child is tormented everyday and she does not even have the confidence to tell her insensitive parents about it? It takes a lot of provocation for me to get angry, but now I am angry as hell.
This is a result of the hypocrisy of the Indian society, where everyone talks, but no one really delivers for pretense has gained priority over substance, and perception of truth is far more important than the truth itself. This is so with political leaders posturing with their holier than thou shibboleths, government babus hiding behind rules and procedures, our straight faced media and their smug paid news, and also with our school authorities. Everywhere a creepy insensitivity has seeped in and taken hold.
Let us talk about schools. Here is the place of maximum disconnect between the young ones and their so called role models. Another child wrote to me once about how “we nearly died on annual day, waiting, starving on the track field” while the chief guest turned up an hour late. Typically, a school principal will worry about serving hot snacks to a visiting chief guest, but ignore hundreds of children who sit in the hot sun waiting to perform some dumb drill.
No wonder students are disconnected from teachers. Somewhere we have all erred as a society. Somewhere we have developed a chilling ability to remain cheerful even as we watch someone suffer in pain. All you young readers out there who read my column every week, here is my advice to you. It is too late to change these crusty oldies of India. If there is something to be learnt from them, we must pledge never to be like them. Let us pledge to shape ourselves to be as different from them. Let them be the last of the accursed insensitive people to have walked on this beautiful land. Amen.