Aren't we modern? My foot!

Are we modern? My foot!!!

Friendship, true friendship, and love. The three most important phases of anyone’s life. These can also be called as three important and most interesting phases of a student’s life. Students of age 13 to 15 are the ones who in this age find their opposite sex attractive and could unconsciously think of such attraction, and there is nothing bad about it as it has some or the other psychological and human development related reasons. But, in a country like India, and if being specific, in a middle class society like ours, where we care more about ‘what people say’ and not about ‘what I feel about my happiness’, we are more concerned about what not to do for the sake of society rather than what to do for the sake of ourselves. A girl, now or then, has to get married to a boy. So, why not give her enough freedom to have her own choice.

Recently I am experiencing such incidences where a friendship between a boy and girl is considered as a love affair, and everybody is gossiping about the same. I really don’t know whether these two students are good friends or they are in love with each other, and if they are, I have nothing to do with them because it is their life. The attitude of our people that is, interfering in others’ freedom of lifestyle or behaviour is killing the innocence and the purity of each relationship. Instead of making the students aware of emotional quotient or aspect of a relationship and equipping them with a good sense of just which would help them in making better decisions in their lives, we are more concerned about emphasizing our views on them by hook or crook. It’s difficult to handle such situation because making fuss of such situation will give you nothing but will convert this simple issue into the complex ones.

My country is made of emotional fools. Here people are happy to talk about Durga and her avatars on the names of women power, but at the same time, they hate to see a girl being independent or moving out of mainstream. We take more pride if we know that our son has a girlfriend, but we feel miserable and even it makes us angrier when we realized that our daughter has a boyfriend. We talk about being equal but we are not ready to remove the darkness from our minds. We talk about being open minded but we are not open enough to consider others’ point of view. This simply means that we are modern by clothes and not by thoughts. Being modern doesn’t mean that you can speak a foreign language like English fluently or can wear some western outfit. It does mean believing in being modern by thoughts where you treat everyone equally and not partial towards a particular gender.

The entire education sector in India has been going through a difficult phase due to this contrasting attitude. The gap between the teacher’s generation and the generation to who she or he is teaching. Old generation values or expectation cannot be implemented as they were in the new generation. Though the proverb ‘old is gold’ sounds good, it is not good for the society. So, let the children be the boss of their own. They know what is good for them and what is bad for them. If they don’t know the difference between good or bad, let them experience the consequences of choosing bad and then let them learn. Some may not be agree with me as they have more protective attitude towards their kids, but my idea of being social is to learn social skills on your own. So, let’s be modern in our outlook.