Of kids and risks

Recently there was an incident in junior’s class that left us shocked. The way in which kids were talking with each other, the bullying, and the kind of ease with which they were talking about things that were much beyond their age left us dumbfounded!! I’ve been cut off from school circles and school going kids’ lifestyle for a long while now and possibly the gradual erosion of the discipline setup in schools is showing its ugly head much closer to home. When I travelled to office, I often used to cross multiple schools going by the different uniforms and irrespective of which time of the day, I always used to see them either in bus or train. Their hairstyles, kind of footwear, even their trousers for that matter, would hardly qualify as school wear. And I used to wonder how come those kids are available at such odd hours, outside during school time. The kind of language used was hardly parliamentary or fit for school kids. But even those can be discounted a bit considering that population doesn’t represent the entire school. What is more frightening is the kind of mindset that is permeating kids at even primary school level. The exposure to violence is omnipresent across every platform they use or encounter and the kind of thought process that goes behind their actions is literally frightening. I had a casual chat with one 5th standard kid on a play area near our home. In fact, the chat started with me enquiring about a red paste applied near his ear. He coolly mentioned that during a scuffle in school, some kid punched his ear, and it started bleeding. To arrest the flow, his grandparent had applied some cream. He started proudly mentioning about all the injuries he had in the past several months!!! His way of learning human anatomy is via injury, I guess. He mentioned about more body part names and bone structures than I had ever learnt in whole of my biology classes!! There were multiple scars on forehead, forearm and he casually mentioned injuries to his cornea, rotator cuff and some more that I forgot!!! He mentioned about how violent his classmates and school mates are, trying to imitate some Japanese cartoon like Naruto(?) or how they beat each other in general, testing their strengths and skills!!! He mentioned about some suicide balcony where at times him and his mates feel “enna vaazhkai da idhu. Idhuku suicide panikalam” (in his own words). After a bit he felt, he might’ve oversold the idea of how bad his school was and went on course correction mode that was even weirder!! He mentioned about how he uses Rubik’s cube to focus and mentioned that he can solve 3*3, 4*4 cubes within minutes and is presently trying out 5*5. He mentioned how he tracks these data using some C++ algorithm and mentioned how comfortable he is in doing coding and tracking such things, all this self learnt out of his own interest. His primary interest being space science. He mentioned something about cold combustion and how his friends will fall faint hearing him explain those topics!!! I really wanted to talk to that kid’s parents to understand if they are either aware of all these things mentioned and if they do, how do they manage to cope up bringing up kids in such environments!! Luckily, at least for now, junior is either outside of such setup or worst-case scenario, we are ignorant of what is going on in his class. But how to address these kinds of perils and potentially life threatening situations have really put the fear of god in my mind. Going by what that kid mentioned, the schoolteachers and the management are absolutely not doing anything to either mitigate or even address these issues, which is not surprising as such, for as long as the fees are being paid the show will always go on!!