Adult-erated Generation

Even as far back as the 1990s, when my son was quite small, schools in the National Capital Region of Delhi were working their magic on children.  They were promoting the idea of celebrating Diwali with no fire crackers and celebrating Holi with only eco-friendly colours.  It had no impact on my son for a couple of years.  But finally peer pressure took over.  Over the years I have got used to many children declining to buy or accept fire-crackers during Diwali.  Or, they get themselves a token packet or two of fire crackers and go to the community centre to pool together with other children to burn them.

As in other years, on Diwali night, I sedated my paranoid pet Pekingese after dinner and put him in his bed.  Then I decided to take a long walk through our rather spacious colony.  DLF Phase I is one of the older and more populated blocks of the “new” Gurgaon and it took me nearly an hour to complete my walk.  It was well past ten and though one could hear the soft rumbling of crackers, very few children were outside, let alone bursting crackers.  A few had gathered at the nearby park and were winding up for the night.

But what was this that I consistently saw on my walk?  I witnessed at least a dozen enthusiastic “children” aged between 40-50 years in different parts of the colony.  They lived in large 500 square yard houses, were very well dressed and were enthusiastically and determinedly bursting noisy bombs well after 10 p.m!  One has always noticed a few over-zealous adults captaining a team of children in bursting fire-crackers while the children look on.  But I saw no real children on my walk.  Why!  Quite often, there was nobody else other than these lone, persistent, determined souls – pre-possessed and quite immune to the pointed stares that I stopped and gave them!

On the following morning, the newspapers confirmed that the level of pollution on Diwali night had actually come down in Gurgaon.  It was attributed primarily to the success that the schools had had at moulding the thinking of a new generation of children.  In some cases, residents claimed that the crackers were burst not by the residents but by children who had come in from slums and urban villages.

But nowhere did they mention how the lesson in civic sense had passed by an entire generation of adults who were schooled in the 1980s or earlier.  Or how to fix this gaping hole!  Maybe I should turn to Pink Floyd for inspiration and appeal to them…  “Hey Teacher!  Leave them kids alone! .. “ …and fix the adult-erated grown-ups instead!

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