Recently, while watching the climax of a film where the hero
gets dreadfully beaten up, I squinted to avoid the horrifying details. However,
I saw my younger son rolling with laughter while watching it. I found it
disgusting that he was growing up without knowing how to be empathetic towards
others and sternly reprimanded him. He looked at me with disbelief and told me
that I should understand that it is just a film and the man is not really
getting beaten. The fact that I was getting upset watching a film was beyond
his comprehension.
This led me to go in for to a serious introspection. Am I
moving away from the real world? When I was small, my grandmother and her team
of friends, an enthusiastic group of film goers used to take me along with them
on one condition. The condition was that I should walk back from the theatre
and should not ask for an auto rickshaw ride. This condition, I gleefully
forgot after the film and used to nag her to hitch a ride back in the rickshaw.
While watching the film, whenever there was a fight scene, I used to get upset
and hide behind the chair. My grandmother would laugh at me and then later
narrate it to everyone much to my embarrassment. My dread of fights has not yet
left me.
Tom and Jerry existed even in our childhood but only in
books. Now, they are alive in TV and their fights look real than ever. The
cartoon characters never get hurt or die even when they are run over by giant
vehicles or fall from indescribable heights. Everything gets revived instantly.
Even the heroes in the movie appear immortal and superhuman. So, unlike me who
used to imagine the silver screen as in real life, today’s child knows to
differentiate between real life and reel life.
In my childhood I was the only child in the house and
neighbors’ and friends’ houses were a strict ‘No No’ to me. So, I could play
only if one of my friends managed to come to my house. This over protectiveness
of my mother still stands in the way of my making acquaintances. Though alone,
I never felt lonely. I used to wander in the backyard among the bushes and
trees. I used to play with leaves and flowers.
I was good at making up stories and dramas. I never had any dolls but
leaves of different shapes and size became my characters. No one bothered as
long as I was inside the compound of the house. So, I was free to do whatever I
wanted to do without anyone watching. If anyone had seen me then, they would
have thought that I was a crazy child. I remained happy in my own world.
Today, even in my wildest dreams, I cannot ask my sons to
spend a day alone like that. I have been able to plant the habit of reading
books in my elder son but I am still struggling to do that with my younger one.
I used to drool at the books on the shelves of the bookstore when my father
occasionally took me to buy them. I still treasure all of them and have handed
some to my elder son.
For kids, a holiday is spent watching TV or playing on the
computer. Otherwise, there are tablets and mobile phones to be engaged with. Even
while riding in the car, their hands are around the tablet or mobile phones
while I gape at the mountains, trees and water around. Whenever I see a lotus
pond or any such diverse spectacle, I would in my excitement, try to divert
eyes from inside the car which is received with little attention from the boys.
Their father would nod with a smile to appease me out of sympathy.
A passionate view of any form of art should definitely lead
to a catharsis; purification of the mind by evoking the feelings of pity, sorrow, anger, laughter or any such
possible human feelings in the audience. Art still evokes emotions but emotions
seem to have undergone a drastic change in the present world where real and
unreal gets mixed up. When witnessing any situation invoking response, the
first reaction of many onlookers is not to react to the situation but to
capture the moment in the cell phone camera. For the real expression of grief,
there are also the endless serials that come on television. For many people,
only their immediate family is real. The other complementary elements of the
eco system stand isolated from their day to day life. Imagination is a sheer
waste of time.
I seem to linger in my childhood world of imagination.
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