Parenting is awesome and I keep wishing and thinking that everybody wants to do a good job of it and does it with good intentions. But when I say we are all a tribe and we have an amazing Circle of Love that we cherish and will surely leave for our children ….I am not been a hundred percent accurate. Because the ideal life me and some, actually many of us fortunate ones live is very far from reality for all the other people out there in the world. A life where children are brought up with morals, love , care, feelings of security , stability and attention, sadly is not the only reality in this world. There is an alternate reality parallel to people like us coming from happy homes, committed to give our children happy lives and them taking it forward making this cycle of happiness continue.
And this reality is evident and staring in our faces every morning in that newspaper on the table and the news channels we flip along with sipping our masala chai, our green tea or smelling those effervescent earl grey leaves as our morning ritual in our cozy peaceful homes.
A dark reality of hundreds of people who are not as fortunate as us, people who have lived in a cycle of abuse, bad relationships, some poverty struck and some who have the money but can’t and haven’t been able to cut their losses of a abusive home. Now how else can we explain what happened in Gurgaon a few days ago….where three men gang raped a nineteen year old mother in an auto after throwing her eight month old baby on the pavement to die. It’s hard to imagine these barbarians also have mothers and fathers and homes of their own. What went wrong with them , how come their reality is so different from us, were they born like that , where is their conscience , how come their hearts didn’t melt seeing a small helpless baby. How did a huggable piece of flesh and bones,an adorable innocent baby find itself on the pavement with a head injury who bled to death while the rapists were taking turns to rape the mother. Who does that to anybody? How can anybody do something like that?
We all woke up cursing the deplorable law and order situation in our country yet again . We woke up to the reality that not every one has a happy home , not every one gets to see their babies grow up in front of their eyes , not everyone gets a chance to do their parenting right, not everyone is fortunate enough to break the cycle of abuse …. not everyone is happy out there. There are barbarians roaming free with rods of steel and black hearts ready to pounce on anybody vulnerable and release their frustrations on them. Where do these people come from …they surely don’t come from homes like ours. They come from wombs of people who have had it tough, who have not seen stability in their own lives or from people who have become too materialistic to have any care left for humanity, who have may be lived with emotional , psychological and physical abuse , who have been scarred for life , who resent the goodness in the world because they didn’t get the same in their share.
They either come from homes where parenting is done very wrong ..I hope unintentionally, where stable home life is either non existent or so toxic because this has become a normal for them. The disadvantaged homes and some fortunate homes have to get up to the reality that there is something wrong that they are doing …..which is desensitising their children , who in turn are living selfish lives and hurting the entire mankind in return.
Our value system has been shaken from its roots ….and that is where our country is feeling the pressure the most. Our reality has changed with our country’s collective degradation of morality and we live in a world where lives are not sacred anymore, where abuse is so rampant that it has become a way of life. Not that the world is only full of such people. There is a lot of goodness out there too. Let’s hope the goodness can out do this barbarism , let’s get out our homes and give back where ever we can and teach our kids to give back where they can …teach our maids and their children to send their kids to school, run programmes of moral lessons in under privileged schools if we can. Let’s encourage our schools to make teaching morals in their schools mandatory. And for the rich who are stuck in the circle of materialism, who make their children feel like God and who are shirking their responsibility of teaching them values and are asking them to go after their happiness even if it means crushing other people on their way.
Let’s stop ignoring the barbarism!
Let’s all collectively make a difference in cleaning up our social structure and do whatever we can do to change this alternate reality and merge it into ours.
Let’s build a society where parenting well is a rule, a duty from which nobody is exempted from.
Let’s do our bit …and make our world more peaceful bit by bit!
Let’s start doing something , however little it may be!
Because we all deeply care for that baby who died on the pavement! And would not want another one being thrown out again and see another mother raped …living a life which is worst than death to forever have nightmares of her helplessness of seeing a part of her perish right in front of her eyes! 😭😭😭
SAAKSHI SINGLA 