Baby's day out - our nightmare!!

Photo Courtesy @ Subhashish Sarkar

I’m sorry but I do not like bratty kids!!

So sue me! But why do I need to apologize? I really do not like kids that are brats! Isn’t it really my choice? Why do I need to feel guilty for exercising my choice? Call me selfish but when I’m out to have a perfectly enjoyable evening with friends, I do not appreciate the screaming, yelling, and often running between the table devils, that people lovingly call kids!

Though I would lay the blame if not equally then more so on the adults accompanying the kids, who quite calmly look the other way as if they are not even there!

Don’t get me wrong! I do not have horns on my head or anything, but If I have paid a neat sum to enjoy a certain ambience etc, why should I let somebody play truant with it! Whoever it be! I know, staying in Delhi there is another devil to deal with! People talking loudly on their mobile phones...Restaurants, movie theatres, malls, every where you look, the omnipresent devil is there! Its as if the entire world around them has just faded away, nobody else is there but the person on the phone, hollering away, however disconcerting it may be to everybody around him/her!

But as usual, I digress....I get dirty looks if I insist on a seat in a kids free zone in a flight! My equivalent to a kid’s free zone being at least 3 rows in front and 3 rows at back free of kids! My luck with the Railways is stuff that legends are made of! I nowadays confidently lay bets with my friends that come what may; I would invariably be surrounded by a screaming hollering bunch of kids in the immediate vicinity!

Yeah yeah, I know, I’m a horrible person! But I don’t care. I would still rather have my sanity around me than lose my cool!

Why can’t the parents nowadays teach their kids some discipline once in a while! I remember getting whacked with an umbrella once when I was young! That too for an innocuous little thing like sneaking out and going to a friend’s place while my parents were chatting across the fence with some other parents in the Air force camp. How the hell was I supposed to know that it would turn into a full fledged panic situation with the entire Air force camp looking for me? Add to that the military police being involved! Well, I still don’t know what that hullabaloo was all about? It was after all an extremely high security area! (My dad was posted in one of the border areas at that time!), the camp was closed from all directions, where could I have vanished? I still maintain till date that that was one of the times my parents overreacted! There were many other instances ofcourse during the course of my growing up..Like my getting slapped every time I sat down to learn math from my dad! It resulted in my detesting that subject permanently! Oh, and of course the one where I was kept out whole night because I was late coming back home! Late was 11 O-clock! Coming back home from office!!! I felt like telling my dad - get a life! But I wouldn't dare! While that was taking discipline to a different tangent altogether, my point was why can’t parents of nowadays enforce discipline in their children once in a while!

Look at me! I didn’t turn out too bad! And I am sure a lot of my friends who have gone through the rigours of similar discipline in their younger days, agree with me here...Almost all of them have beautifully mannered kids!! No coincidence there!!

I was an extremely meek child! Add to that the discipline of a defense household, I’ve had an extremely controlled and disciplined upbringing! When our parents went for parties, all kids were left at some officer’s house with an ayah attending. No questions asked! There was no question of being tagged along with the adults! IT JUST WAS NOT DONE! There was a certain unwritten code of conduct; you just followed it unquestionably! It wasn’t the law of the jungle or something! It was just a structured way of doing things.

It is exactly this upbringing of mine that wants to see a semblance of sanity in today’s children, or even in their parents!

Well to give credit where it’s due, not all kids are brats! Some are so well mannered and sweet that it melts your heart just being near them! To hold them! To hug them!

Here I was rambling on and on about how much I dislike bratty kids, and then it suddenly struck me – after all what is their fault?? They are but pure as mirrors! They will only reflect what they see at home or imitate what they see their immediate society do!

I have always been of the opinion that if you can’t manage kids, please do not have them! Just don’t use the poor guys as fillers for your deficient lives! No seriously! I know of a couple who while going through a rough patch, decided to have a second kid!!! And this, while they could barely devote enough time to their first child! Both being working parents, the poor kid shuttled from maid to maid for years before getting peddled off to a boarding school. A couple of years later he was brought back home again to the care of another maid! The sweet kid that I once knew, I believe ( I have heard) has turned into an attention seeking, tantrum throwing, rebellious brat! I shudder to think of the fate of the second kid!!

But then my problem remains! Even though a lot of times, the kid throwing tantrums and creating scenes at social places belongs to extremely thoughtless and uncouth parents who must have had bad upbringing themselves and see it as a completely normal behavior, it is still left to the likes of us to suffer in silence the unruly behavior of the brats who sadly don’t know any better and who have not been guided any better. All this while a perfectly pleasant evening goes waste!