“Rinku, hands out
of the pocket…”
“Rinku! Hands
out!”
“Rinku!”
During our brief
visit to the Sharmas, I couldn’t help but notice as to how many
times the parents had chided their 14-year-old son, ordering him to
take his hands off the pockets. With the early years of puberty,
clinging awkwardly on to him, he would obey…only to forget the very
next minute, and push them deeper into the lanky pockets of his long
khakis. For my husband and I, the situation was not only becoming
embarrassing, but also taking up proportions of a Sherlock Holmes
mystery. As the parents’ voices grew sterner and sterner, the boy
seemed to withdraw further into himself. There was a growing sense of
displeasure in the very air we breathed, sitting on the leather sofa
of their fine living room in the suburban sprawl of upstate New York.
I thought it was to
do with puberty, and the fact that almost sub-consciously some boys
tend to play with their genitals. In their partial innocence, they
seem unaware of the simple fact that even if their hands remain hidden
inside the pockets, the fabric of the shorts registers the movements.
So, not wanting to aggravate the state of affairs, or create any kind
of embarrassment, I remained quiet. Anyway, I had known the Sharmas
to have very strict parenting norms. But my husband, too curious for
his own good, could not resist himself, “ By the way, what is wrong
with shoving one’s hands in the pocket? A lot of kids do that…even
grown ups.”
“But, it is bad
body language,” Mrs Sharma spoke matter-of-factly, adding, “It
shows lack of confidence. Just like arms crossed over one’s chest
also has negative connotations, signalling defensiveness and
resistance. It can also imply that one is trying to hide something.”
A famous half-length
portrait of Abraham Lincoln, with his arms folded flashed across my
mind, and I wondered what was this great leader trying to hide.
Perhaps, his own greatness.
“Oh, you should
meet my colleague Eric. He is always slouching at the meetings. I
don’t think he will ever get a promotion. Imagine, he has been in
the same grade for the last eight years,” It was Mr Sharma’s turn
to speak now.
Blasphemous.
I could elaborate on
the above conversation, and fill up pages, but the point they were
trying to make was that if we don’t train our kids now for Ivy
Leagues and Presidencies, they might miss the boat. They even dwelt
on the importance of having good even teeth, and a nice smile. Rinku,
Mrs Sharma proudly announced, had just joined a fleet of 3.6 million
American kids who wore braces. In a way, I admired the Sharmas and
their tenacity to drill the young mind into entrenched thinking, to
sacrifice the spontaneity of growing up at the altar of a
remotely-viewed `glorious’ future.
I guess most of us
Indians are generally born with a double edge: we are both driven,
and pushed. As kids, we are pushed by our family in order to become
something and someone when we grow old enough to join the rat-race.
Once in the rat-race, we are driven to perform, to get ahead of
others, to have better remunerations, to have a bigger house, and a
more updated car than the next-door neighbour. It is in-built in our
DNA. It is not by accident that a great percentage of Indian diaspora
is amongst the most affluent section of any society/country. They
are not only smart, but also hardworking, and they save so that their
children can go to good universities. Needless to add, they thrust a
great amount of expectations on their kids to justify the sacrifices
they have made, to be where they are. A lot of these kids will
definitely land up in Ivy League Colleges, and maybe go on to become
CEOs of several Fortune 500 Companies. We, in India, would revel in
their success, and pat our backs, proud of the fact that our country
cousins made it big in the outside world. But, somewhere along the
way, maybe they would have been snatched the right to walk with their
hands tucked deep inside the pockets, or to have a little swing in
their gait and whistle melodies of popular songs...just maybe…
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