There's a bit of Sheena Bora in all our children
Is there anyone who has read Sheena Bora's diary entires, as published by a newspaper, without feeling the pain of a knife in the chest?
A lonely teenager, trying her best to do what is expected of her - the maths tuition, the science coaching class, the hard grind of school which is the lot of our children, since the day we put them out there in society? Her cries for her father's attention? Her advice to him on business, quickly withdrawn lest he thinks she was being too smart for her own good.
The contempt for her mother, and the disagreement with her grandparents on her mother's remarriage: "And now she got married with that old man (Peter Mukerjea). Her this act to Aita and Kaka (Sheena's grandparents) seems very prestigious, very wise, but not in case of me (Read: my grandparents may find this prestigious or wise, but not me). I hate her. I wish her soul gets condemned and even in hell. I have much grief, much tears to flow but when, where and in front of whom?"
We pour so much poison into our children's lives and then get upset when they don't play the game by the rules we have given them. Teenagers especially have a built-in bullshit detector. Adolescence gives them a particular view of authority - some teenagers learn to lie with ease and play the game well, some don't and get labelled troubled, difficult, and impossible. Some learn to manipulate the system, others refuse to get manipulated.
Some parents actually physically abandon their children, as Indrani Mukerjea and Siddhartha Das did, leaving them to wonder like Sheena about her caste, about finances, about sharing her happy birthday with someone (is there anything more poignant than her wishing happy birthday to herself and writing: "But I am not happy. It seems as if I have got nothing in my life. Nothing! My future seems very bleak to me. Just depression has encircled me from all sides. Disgusting life it is. I hate my mother, that bloody b***h. She is not a mother. She is a witch...").
Others abandon their children emotionally, rewarding them if they get good grades, a great college admission, good job and a husband/wife worth flaunting, but ignoring them/sidelining them if they aren't achievers according to the standards we have set.
We fail our children and we think they have failed us.
Do we spare a thought for what our children go through, faced with so much competition in academics, in careers, in relationships? We prepare them for success, with coaching classes, special workshops, and hard-fought school admissions, and then if they fail, we don't know what to do with them.
What about their anger, their angst?
As parents, let's not congratulate ourselves on not being Indrani and Siddharth. Let us instead introspect on how there is an Indrani/Siddharth in each of us. And recognise the scared and lonely Sheenas in all our children.