We need to produce a generation which has compassion in action, not talk
Tajamul Hussain
‘Chillai Kalan’ was spitting ice cubes. Glaciating environs and pitch dark nights would kind of beat the drum,’ this-is-the-right-time-to-make-a-move’. Target destinations for escaping monstrous Chillai Kalan were decidedly Jaipur and Mangalore. Principal MGD girls’ school was kind enough. She allowed the company of our daughter during our stay at Jaipur. Teenage girls find it easier to talk to their mothers, which can make fathers feel as if they aren’t needed. However, this isn’t the case. Girls may find self-esteem in their relationships with mothers, but they find guidance about how to relate to others and how to plan for the future from fathers. For girls are their fathers’ ‘jigar ka tukda’, the little darlings know well how they should be loved by papas. We’d great time with our little darling at the Jaipur.
Rail journey from Jammu to Jaipur, Jaipur to Delhi, then to Bangalore and finally to Mangalore is tiresome. But then imagine your children assume the lead role of making travel plans/arrangements and lug the baggage from and to airport/railway station/hotel etc. My son that joined us at Bangalore railway station immediately took over from me, booked hotel accommodation and then happily stomped around shopping malls, MG and Commercial roads with the shopaholic mom during the two days we stayed there. You get to thank Allah, how much of heart children put in and how much they care for parents.
Mangalore city, in the suburbs of which my son works in a blue chip IT Company, is the chief port city of Karnataka. It’s located about 350 kilometres west of the state capital, Bangalore and lies between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghat mountain ranges. Lying on the backwaters of the Netravati and Gurupura rivers, Mangalore is often used as a staging point for sea traffic along the Malabar Coast. The city has a tropical climate and lies in the path of the Arabian Sea branch of the South-West monsoons. Mangalore is demographically diverse with several languages including Tulu, Konkani, Kannada, and Beary commonly spoken. The city's landscape is characterised by rolling hills, coconut palms, freshwater streams, and hard red-clay tiled-roof buildings.
When your kids accomplish something it means much more than anything you’ve done. My NetGener son never knows a life without internet, computers and mobile phones. For him means of communication are mainly through online communities and social media like Google, MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, email or a cellphone call. Caring parents (mother in particular) are waiting for their working son after a hard toiled digital working day in office, at his remotely place (d) of abode with all kind of tenderness and love…..the young man is simply on top of the world, on cloud nine. But then he soon shudders with the visions that the happier days shall soon be over as the parents depart.
Keen as mustard to groom my children into contended, highly functioning, no-limit adults I want them to be able to handle life’s difficulties without allowing themselves to be so overwhelmed by them (and the dangerously corrupt system). I can’t see children sacrifice and bear humiliation of sinking through the floors and licking and throwing themselves at the feet of kingmakers. The most natural thing for parents is to expect children to fulfil their own unachieved desires or to even follow in their footsteps. I wish my siblings are totally different from us in terms of shifting goalposts and better idea of what they want from their life. It is foolish to assume that we could impose our dreams and desires/goals on to these ‘star-in-my-eyes’ little fellows. As advanced economies are honeycombed with millions of social inventors, innovators, organisational risk takers, dreamers and practical men and women, it’s only the better education with access to more knowledge, armed with the most powerful knowledge tools and skills known to humankind and of course an environment free of political and physical uncertainties that shall provide a chance for us to invent better tomorrow and be remembered as builders and not the consumers, profiteers and hoarders.
India, the 2nd buyer, in the banking parlance, getting benefited, eg from the overcapacity in fibre optics, mines brains of its own people to churn out some of the most gifted engineering, computer science and software whiz kids on the globe to be of the great use to developed world, the 2nd buyer of the Indian brain power. The 21st century being talent based, today your first management job out of business/engineering school could be melding specialties of a knowledge team. That takes a very special kind of skill (much in demand in the world) which in India is available at the IITs, IIMs, NITs, BITS and others similar premier schools. In India it is only 50-60000 students from these institutions which matter when compared to the total of more than 12 million enrolled in higher education that people talk about. As they are the whiz kids who are responsible for the Indian economic miracle, I for one always propose Kashmiri Muslims acquire quality education from suchlike top notch institutions to be the part of this creamy layer. We got to breed a progeny of ‘no nonsense persons’ who’re about compassion in action, not talk, and instead of locking themselves with theories, dogmas and window-dressing religious bigotry roll up sleeves and make world a better place.
Feedback at hoosyn50@gmail.com/tajamulhussain.webs.com