Even Amal in 'Dakghar'* was better off

Twenty-first century parents, shame on you
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Surajit Dasgupta
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There used to be a time when children were mere pawns in the hands of their parents. Not only in major decision-making processes pertaining to the child's career and marriage, but also in case of every little move in his quotidian life, the parents used to impose severe vigilance and censorship on him. The nation must have lost thousands of promising painters, singers, actors and, above all, leaders, for their parents wanted them to be respectable clerks (this is how this writer describes every individual on a desk job, including IAS officers) or do things that the parents failed to accomplish at youth. What vicariousness! Hundreds of lovers must have committed suicide or went on to live unhappy married lives because their parents forced them to marry those whom they did not love. Yet, few lives were lost while speeding on a highway; few were run over by rampaging adolescents behind the wheels; few boys took to substance abuse; and few unwed, school-going girls got pregnant...

A young boy today wouldn't die a slow, miserable death at home where he has been confined and quarantined unlike an ailing Amal, the protagonist in Rabindranath Tagore's famous 1912 play, Dakghar. But die he will, in the process killing a dozen bystanders on road. Today's teenage rebellion, if at all recklessness can be described by this more respectable term, is not about chasing great ambitions or eloping with the person one loves from the core of the heart against the wishes of parents and society. It is about lives that are unsure of a direction. After centuries of repression, the children of this country have not revolted; they have gone mad, it seems. Worse, it seems the parents couldn't care less unless, of course, the situation becomes irredeemable.

Even as a voyeuristic society of adults devours every bit of news and views on the month-long Aarushi murder case, it complains that the children are now psyched. Three teenagers die as their car overturns and rolls over the divider in the pitch darkness of about 3 am in Gurgaon, and a few drunk adolescents in car run over almost a dozen people in Mumbai. What the hell were the parents in each of these cases, and all such cases, doing before these incidents happened and at the exact time when they happened?

It is noted with a lot of concern that in most big cities in the country, parents have reduced to being no more than biological machines vending babies. The regular readers of this blog must have read how fathers of teenagers in West Bengal are not kept in the loop on important decision matters and critical events unfolding in the family, in the post, “Kolkata: A Cultural Shock To A Probashi Bengali” (http://surajitdasgupta.blogspot.com/2007/11/kolkata-cultural-shock-to-probashi.html). Here is how bad the situation is in Delhi and the extended metropolis called the National Capital Region.

In the summer of 2002, about 240 of 1,700 odd students at BRAIN Institute of Languages & Sciences, the chain of coaching centres this writer used to run, defaulted. On scrutinising the defaulters’ family backgrounds, it was found that all of them had been, without exception, accompanied by their mothers to our centres during the process of admission. The fathers of more than 200 of them did not know where the children were going for private tuition. These were the same fathers, each of whom had bought their children crackers worth more than Rs 20,000 last Diwali. These were the children who would every other month flaunt new mobile phone handsets worth more than Rs 30,000 each, that too at a time when even expensive handsets had no great features to write home about; their fat price tags happened to be their sole USP. These were the children who would come to attend the classes in new premium segment cars every quarter of the year.

Owing to the wafer-thin margin of profit that the institute ran on, it couldn’t have absorbed the financial shock of about 240 cases of default. We thought putting the above fathers to shame would be the right approach to recover the fees due. So at crucial junctures, we turned up at the offices of these exporters, sole proprietors of firms, directors of big Indian companies, CEOs and vice presidents of MNCs, etc to tell them in front of their junior colleagues that their enterprises with turnovers of hundreds of thousands of millions of rupees notwithstanding, they were perhaps too poor to pay Rs 5,000 per month for their children’s education. Ashamed, most of them paid up.

But the above was only the last resort. Before that, we had taken the milder approach of talking to the defaulting students’ mothers. Rather funnily, these women would give us an appointment and then not honour it. Or, they would call home our recovery boys at a certain time and then rush out, leaving with the domestic helps excuses as serious as hospital visits or as frivolous as shopping. When we could finally catch up with them and talked them out to know what really the problem was, our disgust turned to their menfolk. These multi-millionaires and billionaires, it turned out, left no more than about Rs 20,000-Rs 25,000 per month (excluding the expenses incurred on impulsive shopping) with their wives to run the household. And the women would try their best to save as much as possible from that amount. Due to the kind of culture that dictates the priorities of people of the National Capital Region, the axe would fall on the cost incurred on education, not that on kitty parties.

Much as I may have taken my next decision for selfish reasons, I feel I played a little part in improving the conduct of hundreds of families living in south Delhi. BRAIN declared that only those students would be admitted to the institute who would be accompanied by both the parents during admission.

To know the psychology of the children of the above ilk, we must travel further backwards in the road this writer has traversed in the professional world. Establishing a business of education, with howsoever unique selling propositions, is not an easy job, given the mushrooming of me-too coaching centres all over the cities of this country. In the late 1990s, I was a beggar who couldn’t have been a chooser. Leaving my car aside to save on petrol, I would travel by a scooter hundreds of kilometres to and fro in the NCR to teach anything from French to physics to anyone, be it a sixth grader in Tivoli Gardens or an undergraduate in Punjabi Bagh. After all, to start regular classes, with students in each batch agreeing to a given time slot of lecture session at my institute, was too tough a job to accomplish for a new business.

In half the cases of such private tuitions, the mother would turn up the first day to explain what kind of a child I would have to deal with; the father was always conspicuous by his absence. In the other half, the child would be all alone at home, evoking a strong sense of pity in me with his/her sympathy-seeking gaze. Unlike the impression being created by the media, none of them, barring a few tongue-in-cheek type students of the American Embassy School, were ill-behaved.

In a few months, this ‘Sir’ would become the virtually abandoned children’s friend. I would have to, in between explaining Lagranges’ Mean Value Theorem and Kepler’s Laws, counsel them out of their anxieties and give their confused ambitions a proper direction.

Several years with teenagers have revealed a common personal activity of these ‘kids’. Many of them draw their little, discontinuous life sketches on the last two pages of their scrap notebooks. There, one would find the mention of girlfriends and boyfriends, if any, and vices too, if any. Having chanced upon scores of such scraps and then probed into dozens of others, I can say that the young are anything but reckless. And their feelings are the same as those of the adolescents of the 1980s. If anything, the lingo and style of expression has changed. Rather than eliciting concern, if the thought process of teenagers is not at all rebellious — as it is now, as it was 20 years ago — the teenagers in question are abnormal, whose brains have not developed as they should have. Of course, there is something the parents are not able to handle. It’s not the child’s thought. It’s his/her expression. It’s unfortunate that when these parents were kids three decades ago, they used to complain of similar insensitivity by their parents. It is clear, they didn’t learn from history, their very own history.

Let’s also study the scenario in lower middle class households. I think I was 10 years’ old then. Two of my pals and I were sitting inside a park in our neighbourhood in Bokaro Steel City. There must have been a lot of things we discussed that day, all of which, again, must have been so insignificant for us that we soon forgot them. However, the next evening a woman arrived at our home only to tell my mother that I was overheard speaking of something so ‘obscene’ that she would “die of shame uttering those words”. My mother, an open-minded parent, was amused. I was scared, wondering if there was really some bad word that had slipped out of my mouth. The woman bored the hell out of us by repeatedly alluding to my “obscenity” but feeling too ‘shy’ to speak up about it. Realising her problem, I left the house for my neighbour’s.

On return, I came to know that my ‘obscenity’ referred to my discussing — rather, speculating — with my friends the last evening from which part of a mother’s body a baby comes out. We all had funny answers. Bidyut, one of the two friends, said that the mother vomits the baby out. Sanjeev, the other pal, thought it just appeared out of thin air. I had seen huge bellies of pregnant women and guessed it must be taken out by tearing the abdomen apart (which was not a wrong guess entirely, considering cases of Caesarean section).

Not ready to be branded ‘ultra modern’, my mother feigned anger in front of the complainant and the latter left happy, assured that I would be subjected to some harsh punishment for my 'obscenity'. I was, however, not apprehended or scolded for my chosen topic of discussion on my return home. That doesn’t quite mean that my mother was modern. When asked the same question, she dodged, increasing my curiosity further.

For three more years, the question troubled me and I got all kinds of funny answers from my peers. The idea and purpose behind not letting a child know biology was — and is — counter-effective. The elusive answer that a child of 10 could have forgotten the next day, had he got the answer promptly, lingered on as a disturbing secret, as if a secret pertaining to some forbidden crime, till he was 13. In those three years, every wrong answer that he got could have led him astray into the dark roads of life from where no one has ever returned unscathed. This surely cannot be any ‘traditionally shy’ parent’s intention.

Let’s cut the scene to 2007. One night I was returning home with my colleagues by the office cab. The topic, questions asked by children, figured in our chats. Those who were parents were of the opinion that even in this time and age, the question I was discussing with my friends a few decades ago couldn’t be answered by parents. And this unanimous opinion came from journalists. What a shame! I couldn’t convince my colleagues that during a lecture session on reproduction in a biology class, no student giggles because of, first, the teacher’s deadpan expression and, second, the most unromantic of ways to explain something — technical lingo. Why can’t parents employ the same technique for birds and bees?

Nonetheless, the salaried class parents do have other answers, though not of birds and bees, to tell their children. Spare a thought for the children of the rich, the Lucy Grays who are lost in woods that are supposed to be their homes. In the overall course of seven years of teaching students of schools and colleges, I came across five cases of substance abuse by teenagers. In the first, when the parents were reported of their child’s dubious whereabouts, the response was one of disbelief. They refused to accept that the child had taken to contraband drugs and asked me to mind my own business — that was to teach and only teach and not look elsewhere. The second set of parents thrashed the child black and blue, forcing him further into depression and, hence, drugs. The third asked me to discontinue teaching their child. So, in the last two cases, I took upon myself the onus of counselling the children out of their disastrous ways. The rehabilitation and recovery took more than a year. Perhaps a professional could have managed it faster. But for that the parents should have stepped in — a service I had become too apprehensive to solicit owing to the three adverse experiences therebefore.

A far more delicate case was that of a lonely girl, suffering as much from vitiligo as for her parents’ indifference. The first evening in her sprawling bungalow in Friends Colony, about half-an-hour into the maths lesson, the girl literally tried to play footsie with me. After a gentle admonition, she desisted, but would every now and then hold my hand while pretending to reach out for her pen, pencil, rubber or ruler. By the time the day's lesson ended, she understood I was no tool for her entertainment. So, she told her mother that night that I hardly knew any maths to be able to teach her. When I reached their house for the next lesson, with my reputation at stake, I asked the mother to sit through that evening’s session. If she too were to end up with the same opinion about my mathematical and teaching skills, I would leave forever without a squeak of protest, I said.

It seemed the mother had had similar experiences with other tutors in the past. She did not care much for her daughter’s complaint and left an hour after the commencement of the two-hour lesson, satisfied. Frustrated, the girl started misbehaving with me the next day onwards. It took me a lot of patience, sense of humour and about three months to become that girl’s friend as well as confidant. I learnt later that she hated her mother for her new ‘father’ — actually the woman’s boyfriend. That man, who looked to me as normal in his demeanour as the girl’s biological father, had stepped into their lives a few months before I started teaching the girl. And it was barely a month after her father divorced her mother.

The girl’s abnormally whitening skin must have made her feel all the more miserable. It’s so difficult to make someone believe that his/her looks are not important. I wish my student’s mother had helped me in counselling her. She seemed to have no inclination or time for it. The girl told me once that she thought she would never have a boyfriend because of her discolouring skin. My heart filled with pity when she asked me in the same breath whether I had rejected her advances for the same reason. She asked if leukoderma had a cure. I knew of some treatments, but not any cure. Without sounding insensitive, I asked her to wait for the day when she would be all white instead of partially white. By then, we had become good enough friends for her not to be offended by that remark. Today her skin is all white; she is employed with a prominent IT company as a software engineer, and has been seeing a boy her age for about a year. I pray the two get married and live happily ever after. Oh yes, my student tells me that she has accepted her foster father too.

I am tempted to look back at West Bengal again with an anecdote at this juncture of the story. Percentage-wise, the state probably has the largest population of married couples who once had a teacher-student relationship. Accepting the risk of sounding clichéd, the teacher is better when he is fatherly. My inability to teach my wife Urdu, my maiden failure as a teacher, is ample proof.

The two most riveting cases I had had to handle were those of three boys in NOIDA and a girl in Hauz Khas. The boys were turning bisexual, with the eldest brother having lost his love interest to a rival in school. The incident made him a woman hater who turned to men for love, care as well as sex. With some coercion or persuasion, the younger brothers relented, or thought it would be fun.

There were a few domestic helps fetching the boys things that they wanted. The parents, with whom I had spoken only on phone, were nowhere to be traced in the five-bedroom house. Having had several engineer friends from Tripura, a state whose lack of education infrastructure pushes students to remote corners of the country’s Regional Engineering Colleges where they live for four years at a stretch without the sight of any girl around, I could make out from the boys’ body language that they were not bisexuals who claimed to be born so; they had an incident as a reason that triggered their “alternative sexuality”. For the eldest son, the reason was chiefly betrayal in love. For the younger two, it was the constant bickering between their parents which had given them a notion that opposite sexes couldn’t be compatible as, their hypothesis said, the two sexes were too different to be able to understand each other.

Lofty pep-up talks wouldn’t help these boys. They had to be taken to public functions where their peers participated. They had to mingle with boys and girls their age whose parents were happy couples. They had to see instances of love relationships that were honest, committed and, hence, steady. They had to be told that the expensive mobile handsets they carried would look better as their outfit if bought of the money not their father but they earned from hard work. If independence is what they sought, why were they conveniently dependent on their father’s income to flaunt a certain status in society?

With the NOIDA couple almost never at home, it was easy for me to invite their children on phone from their classmates’ residences on all happy occasions. In between the academic lessons, they were asked to choose between total dependence and total independence. As earning the kind of money required to earn the membership of NCR’s high society was no way possible for them at that stage, they gradually turned to conformism, ashamed of exhibiting commodities bought of inherited wealth. In due course, their aversion for girls disappeared and they realised that getting physically intimate with other boys was, in their case, a reactionary self-imposition; it did not come naturally to them.

In case of the query from Hauz Khas, the father of the girl had contacted me. That was the time I was winding up my work as a banker to pounce headlong into my business. The mother of the girl above happened to be the bank’s client for five years. When her business inquiry had first come in, I was asked by my then boss to collect the necessary documents from her house. After arriving at her bungalow’s gate, passing the sentry and ringing the doorbell, I must have waited for about 10 minutes for the door to open. Since not all her papers were ready, I had to come back another day a week later. When I was once again made to wait for more than 10 minutes at the door, I asked the guard to find out if everything was okay. The guard threw at me a suggestive smile and went around the boundary wall to peep inside the house from some window, if left ajar by chance. He returned a couple of minutes later, saying, “आइये मेरे साथ ; ख़ुद ही देख लीजिये madam को निकलने में इतनी देर क्यों हो रही है (Please come along; see for yourself why 'madam' is taking so long to come out).” A window, that of a bathroom, was indeed left ajar and so was its door. A part of a bedroom could be seen from there. A Great Dan was lying over the woman who had not a shred of a cloth over her body. The woman, I was told by her voyeur guard, used to spend hours in her locked bedroom, lying naked with her dog.

In five years since then, the Hauz Khas address had slipped my mind. It struck me when I reached the lane that led to that house. I stopped at a cigarette shop and inquired about the address, as if I didn’t know where it was.

Chewing a betel leaf, the paanwallah asked me what business I had there. I told him I was a tutor. “उस घर से बच के रहिये ; मेरी मानिये तो मत जाइये वहाँ (Stay away from that house; if my advice is worth anything, it’s better to avoid them),” the man said with a clear Bihari accent. On prodding I came to know that the young girl in that house had of late acquired, or inherited, her mother’s fetish for sex with their pet. The dog, clearly with a taste different from that of humans, didn’t quite like the younger girl and bit her almost fatally in her neck besides gnawing her all over. And it was their guard who spread the news all around the neighbourhood. The girl had returned from a nursing home a week ago. I took the paanwallah‘s advice and did not venture into that house. The girl’s father called me frantically all day long at my mobile phone. I did not receive any of his calls.

A year later, my institute was inaugurated at the basement of a jewellery shop — whose owner’s children I would have to teach for free in lieu of the place’s rent that I still couldn’t afford — in Kalkaji. That beleaguered father from Hauz Khas walked in the next day. I learnt that he had got my reference not from his wife’s connection with the bank I was earlier employed in, but from the parents of the girl from Friends Colony. He thought I had a formula for errant children. I had none; he was wrong. After much persuasion by him, I was ready to admit the girl.

In her initial days at our centre, after being absent for about a week post-admission, she would talk to nobody in her batch of students. She wouldn't even attempt to answer questions from the subject being taught. I guessed she had presumed that her privacy had been breached. Her father must be forcing her to attend my classes, as his imposing figure was seen inside the SUV that he would park right in front of our study centre's gate, with a clear display of lack of civic sense. He appeared more like a hangman accompanying a prisoner on a death row.

On being summoned to my office one day, the girl told me she thought all her classmates knew of her and her mother's scandal. No one did, I assured her. She appeared less tensed the next day onwards.

A year later, her mother was taken for psychiatric treatment to a different city. But before the treatment could bear some result, she committed suicide. The girl, my student, had suicidal tendencies too. All the staff of BRAIN would be wary of every move of hers at our workplace, lest we should get embroiled in any untoward case and the image of the institute should take a beating. The constant vigil by our staff made the girl retreat all the more into a cocoon. Her mother's suicide worsened her mental condition. She needed to see hope in some tangible form in her life.

I had noticed she could write well. She used to write prose in English with abruptly broken lines and claim it to be poetry. Her language was good, but the tenor was depressing. Fortunately, her weak Hindi turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Once she joined our Hindi classes, one after another, she was exposed to the best of enthralling poetry by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar and Jaishankar Prasad among others. The 'foster cousins' of Keats and Shelly and the art gallery aficionados, that is, the party-hopping intellectuals in this country may not know that poems in no other language are as inspiring.

With the girl's weak grammar as an excuse, we got the chance to encourage her to compose more poems, this time in Hindi, so that there was more scope for corrections and consequent improvement in her language. When her creations finally 'arrived', we got her collection of poems published and circulated among all her friends at our study centre and her school. Today she lives in New York, has several published titles to her credit, and writes in various poetry websites. I hope she has forgotten her Hauz Khas days, as if they never happened.

All these wayward children need no more than some time with the parents. And “time” does not merely mean going to a multiplex or a dazzling mall with the children on weekends. It refers to the quieter times when the kids ask questions at home. Rarely are there parents who can consider themselves Einstein enough to dismiss those questions as stupid. You did not discover the wheel or the fire. So what makes you such a snobbish intellectual that you find it demeaning to enter a discourse with your child?

The problem could be of a different nature. The child does not ask you any question. In that case, you must have scared the hell out of him/her when he/she was a toddler. It’s a pity that despite all our pretensions of modernity, children still confide, if at all, only in their mother, and most mothers still wield this sole weapon of authority in front of their pesky kids: “Let your father be back from office. He’ll teach you a lesson.” But the father returns home only when the children are fast asleep. And corporal punishment is no lesson, anyway.

With all the postgraduate medical education at a psychiatrist’s disposal, the doctor is still less than a parent. If only the parents understood it! For them, it seems it is inconvenient to accept this truth. And now, for the Westernised parents with a bundle of messed up neurons, going to a stylishly pronounced “clinical psychologist” is a fashion statement too.

As for the fallout of the Aarushi murder case, if the children are now looking at their parents with suspicion, as is being reported these days, it’s time the so-called guardians (what do they guard, is a big question) questioned their sickening taste of watching with children the follow up of this case on television for days on end. And you thought cricket overshadowed every other passion of Indians? Well, a certain IPL match failed to excite us, voyeurs, as much.

Yet, our larger home, our world that we lovingly call India, is not all lost. The cases I have cited from my experience as a teacher do not constitute even one per cent of the total number of students, most of them epitomes of compliance, I have taught. And when some of that fractional percentage of children die while driving, inebriated, a Skoda Laura at 150 kmph around India Gate, some girl gets raped at a spot from where the nearest bus stop is at least five kilometres away in either direction — no girl is safe anywhere in the world if alone on a street at 2:30 am — some girl is allowed to have her ways so much that eventually a drunk, frustrated parent allegedly kills her in a fit of fury… — with all these incidents having happened so deep in the night when only mongrels make their presence felt on roads with their howls — it's only their parents who are to blame. Such incidents show the horrible consequences of parental indifference both during and after the process of upbringing. What possible business could children have in the city's empty streets between 2:30 am and 4:30 am? The fate of these young victims puts the whole class of society that we know as “parents” to shame. Perhaps when when these parents were young boys and girls, they couldn't even breathe at home under the repressive regime of their parents. Perhaps that makes them let go of their wards. This laissez faire may be plausible, but not condonable. Neither extreme makes a sane society.

As for their alibis, the shameless rich father has always said that he chases money (all day and whole night) for none but the family. Now the equally shameless mother, a career woman, says it too. But no one is as shameless as a mother who is a housewife. We were taught in school that by educating a woman, one educates two families. Well, in this age, the womenfolk in every middle class and rich household is educated. Then, why are, of all children, even the kindergarten kids sent to private tutors?

* "Dakghar, published in 1912, was written in a mood of profound Weltschmerz brought on by a series of bereavements and distress at a violent turn in the nationalist movement. What there is of a storyline is simplicity itself. Confined indoors on doctor’s orders, the fatally ill Amal yearns for freedom and open spaces, engages passers-by in eager conversation from the vantage of an open window and, fascinated by a new Post Office visible in the distance, develops a fancy that he will receive a letter from the King, an obviously allegorical personage. Amal represents the man “whose soul has received the call of the open road.” He makes a new world for himself by his imagination and insatiable curiosity, and the passersby bring the world action to him."

- http://theatre.ucsd.edu/season/dakghar/

Tagore (right) as Faqir in his play Dakghar, 1917

Other references:

• Three teens killed in Gurgaon accident: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/3_teens_killed_in_Gurgaon_accident/rssarticleshow/3130318.cms
• Speed, alcohol kill two at India Gate: http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Speed-alcohol-kill-two-at-India-Gate/276626/
• Aarushi case deeply affecting kids: http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080053165
• Delhi college girl raped, assaulted: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1103006.cms

Responses:

Minister for Women & Child Development Renuka Chowdhury and Hindustan Times are spot on. The HT editorial (19 June 2008) [http://hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=e5a6b897-8cc2-4b88-8eb2-5570960c48d7]:

Brakes on a runaway menace

Every time you drink too much and put your foot on the accelerator, death gets into the passenger seat with you, goes a saying. It is advice that most adults in India disregard when it comes to allowing their children access to both drink and cars. Three sets of parents found this out to their bitter cost when their sons lost their lives in a drunken driving accident over the weekend in Gurgaon. Women and child development minister Renuka Chowdhury is spot on when she says the onus for under-age children driving rests on the parents. Guardians are primarily responsible for their wards and as such must be held accountable to the law. This will encourage parents to make clear to their children where to draw the line.
A high-speed vehicle in the hands of a child is not just fatal to his life but also to that of hapless bystanders. It is upto the parents to demonstrate to their children that the law must be respected and that rules cannot be bent by browbeating the police as is so often the case in India. As Ms Chowdhury advocates rightly, the owner of a vehicle found in the custody of a minor has to be penalised. But, as we know, the changes in the law will take their time to come.
Meanwhile, it is vital that schools shed their attitude of denial and address the issues of drinking and under-age driving upfront. It is not enough to inculcate moral values like respect and honesty bypassing the reality of life as it is in nuclear families with disposable incomes. While bringing parents under the purview of the law, establishments like liquor vends and bars that sell to minors must also be cracked down on. The unfortunate boys who died were returning from a bar in an upmarket locality in a borrowed car. Everyone involved in the incident is culpable. None of these measures will eliminate the problem in its entirety. But it will certainly scatter pebbles in the path of minors and their parents. And save several lives.

The Times Of India swerves to avoid an accident, but crashes. Putting it rather bluntly, the following editorial must have been written by a career man/woman who is also a parent who has lost control over his/her child(ren) [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/Over_The_Top/articleshow/3143193.cms]:

Over The Top

Should parents be punished for the trespasses of their children? The feisty minister for women and child development, Renuka Chowdhury, seems to think so. Reacting sharply to news of a fatal road accident near the capital recently, in which an allegedly underage boy was at the wheel, she says it is parents who ought to be hauled up whenever a minor gets behind the wheel. Her knee-jerk reaction is not an off-the-cuff remark; the minister plans to take it up with the road transport authorities and make parents culpable for traffic-related violations by minors. With due respect to the minister's well-intentioned outburst, measures such as revoking the driving licences of parents if a minor is caught driving are excessive. They would supersede laws that already exist, meant to deal with such transgressions. If only law enforcers did their jobs, that is. To blame parents for allowing their underage children to take the wheel is to assume that they are in the know and that they have granted permission. But this can't simply be assumed in every case. Quite often, adventurous children tend to do things without the knowledge of their parents. They manage to plead with or convince chauffeurs to let them drive or to make the car available to them for a while. Road safety is a serious concern. But to ensure safety on the roads, a legal system with checks and balances is already in place. Violators need to be apprehended and punished by traffic regulators whose job includes looking out for offences. If kids are caught often enough taking to the wheel, parents are going to face the music in any case. Civil society groups and publicly funded awareness campaigns ought to educate both parents and children on road safety and the risks involved. However, civil action and self-awareness among citizens cannot exonerate bad policing. Neither can responsible parenting or greater vigilance at home mean reduced responsibility for law enforcers. The minister meant well when she expressed outrage over the grave risks of underage and drunken driving. The solution, however, is present already: Shake up law enforcement and make it more effective. The roads are bound to get safer.

The writer is a mathematician and linguist, now a corporate communicator and has been a journalist, a teacher and marketing manager (in reverse chronological order) in his previous vocations