How celebs like Emraan Hashmi help us become better parents
Every three minutes, a child is diagnosed with cancer somewhere in the world.
In India, 50,000 new childhood cancer cases are diagnosed each year. And 50-70 per cent children with cancer are still dying of the disease due to lack of awareness, stigma, late diagnosis and detection, exorbitant cost of treatment, inadequate cancer treatment facilities and insufficient supportive care.
These are figures from CanKids, which works towards bringing about change for childhood cancer in India. The reason I've put these figures here is because we live in a country where cancer is becoming so common that almost every other house has a case.
But we still don't talk about it. It's still the dreaded "C" word. Families discuss it in hushed tones and open conversation is still not a reality. Imagine then, what happens when a child is afflicted with the disease?
Desperate measures
That's exactly the space actor Emraan Hashmi found himself in, when his 6-year-old son Ayaan was diagnosed with cancer. As any parent would, he put his work on hold and became, as he says, obsessed with cancer research. He visited several oncologists and became half a doctor.
But, instead of keeping quiet, he decided to pen down his son's battle and The Kiss of Life - How A Superhero & My Son defeated Cancer (co-authored by Bilal Siddiqi), released this month.
Not only is it a huge step forward in putting the paediatric cancer conversation in the public space and therefore normalising it to a certain extent, it also marks a shift in how celebrities interact with the public.
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| Every three minutes, a child is diagnosed with cancer somewhere in the world. (Pic courtesy: Craig Boehman) |
Speaking at the Penguin Random House Spring Fever 2016 festival in Delhi, Hashmi was candid enough to lay bare his insecurities, and spoke for so many parents when he voiced their deepest fears, "The main thing as a parent I was battling against was that no one really told me that my son will be okay after six months of chemotherapy."
He was joined on the panel by another celebrity parenting author, Sonali Bendre Behl, whose book The Modern Gurukul - My Experiments with Parenting, released last year. Behl started jotting down notes on bringing up her son (who is ten now) and these eventually found their way into a book. She's talked about her son's struggle with stuttering, and confessed that she's a controlling mom, who's learning - with the support of her husband - to calm down.
In the past, Indian celebrities have always guarded their privacy and never discussed personal issues, least of all their ailments, publicly, which is why Hashmi and Behl's books are path-breaking.
In the West too there are only a few examples. Jenny McCarthy, who has an autistic son, has written books about pregnancy (Belly Laughs and Baby Laughs) and Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds about bringing up an autistic child. And there's Brooke Shields who has written Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression.
Since celebrities are role models, the more they choose to talk about relevant parenting issues that all of us deal with on a day-to-day basis, the more it helps to start a debate, collaborate, and move from denial and secrecy to knowledge and solutions. More power to them.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)