...hunting the child within a child!
The disappointment on our face can completely devastate our child.
Let us Stop living our unsuccessful dreams through our children. In the name of talent we are hunting the child down.
It all started of with my child wanting to perform on Sadda Haq from the Ranbeer starer Rockstar for the talent hunt at his school. I was very enthusiastic and suggested to him, how could he wear his mom's harem pants to impress the judges. I failed to realize for a while that my child's true talent lies in his oratory skills and not in dancing or singing. What I was trying to do was, live my ambition through him.
I, as a child would have loved to be on stage and enthrall the audience with a guitar and a live-wire performance, knowing very little that just thinking of a performance and actually pulling it off are two different things.
Thankfully my son is blessed with a mother who knows where his actual talent lies and so she put it to him very clearly that he should try a Shakespeare poem; may be Quality of Mercy. He is blessed with even more sensibility to trust his mom and immediately lapped onto the idea.
He started asking more about The Quality of Mercy, he was inquisitive to know when was it exactly recited in the original story, by whom, in what context and so on.
I realized, he was actually so much more interested in it. We went ahead with the preparations, my wife helped him with the correct pronunciations and I helped him with the expressions and the rest we left onto him.
He went! He recited!! He conquered!!!
He won the first prize. Kudos to him!
Surely if he would have given the Rockstar jig a try, he would have done his bit but definitely not won a prize. He would have come out with a feeling no human likes, of being a failure.
The scene at a talent hunt is something we would as parents always been a part of but in retrospection as an onlooker I saw something else.
There were parents, who ran into the first row to prompt the child. Some mothers even were giving expressions which they expected the child to express without any flaws, and when they didn't, they showed their disappointment so clearly on their expressive face, it crushed the child's natural flair and the child completely went into a shell. As for the child, winning that inanimate trophy made of some cheap metal is not at all as important as much as our approval.
Some father's were even biting into their nails, some parents hopped onto the stage and prepared the microphone, the sitar, combed the child's hair and it appeared as if given a chance they themselves would start performing on stage instead of their kids. Some had hired low cost self proclaimed genius choreographers and had the audacity to paint the child blue for Shankar Bagvan's Tandav.
Failing to realize that the child is in pre-school where the child is far from knowing such emotions, forget actually emoting it.
Stop there! Stop it, because in the name of Talent we are hunting our child's inner child and hunting it down badly.
Some shivered, some cried, some scratched their body in nervousness, some just froze. Very few actually were able to carry it off. All that the children were interested in, after the performance, were the bag of goodies they received from the school and eating it off with their friends. Some ran here and there without paying heed to the other performers nor to the teachers who ran behind them trying to control their natural talent of being just themselves.
My three feet younger son narrated the story of The Honest Woodcutter with such good command on his language and with so much of confidence, the front row parents naturally came out with a WOW! Both these guys could do it, for the simple reason that they did what they were good at.
Lets Tap our child's natural talent and if we can't, lets not try to infuse our unfulfilled wishes in form of talent.
Remember, no health drinks, claiming that our child would grow faster, actually ever made a difference to our or our child's growth because no matter what you eat or drink or supplement; you can't grow taller than what your genes are coded for.
So let the growth be natural.
Very few children are gifted with extra ordinary skills and reservoir of talent. The other many are just different like you and me without these special qualities. But definitely we all have something unique and special which only we have and no one else. Just help our child to discover it and we never know we may discover our own.
Till then, enjoy television programs where children are made to compete and display talents and winners are glorified like international heroes....
And in some quite moments when the television is unplugged, think of those thousands who never made it. They are living the hell of being called losers on international television.
©Nozzer Pardiwala. All Rights Reserved.
The disappointment on our face can completely devastate our child.
Let us Stop living our unsuccessful dreams through our children. In the name of talent we are hunting the child down.
It all started of with my child wanting to perform on Sadda Haq from the Ranbeer starer Rockstar for the talent hunt at his school. I was very enthusiastic and suggested to him, how could he wear his mom's harem pants to impress the judges. I failed to realize for a while that my child's true talent lies in his oratory skills and not in dancing or singing. What I was trying to do was, live my ambition through him.
I, as a child would have loved to be on stage and enthrall the audience with a guitar and a live-wire performance, knowing very little that just thinking of a performance and actually pulling it off are two different things.
Thankfully my son is blessed with a mother who knows where his actual talent lies and so she put it to him very clearly that he should try a Shakespeare poem; may be Quality of Mercy. He is blessed with even more sensibility to trust his mom and immediately lapped onto the idea.
He started asking more about The Quality of Mercy, he was inquisitive to know when was it exactly recited in the original story, by whom, in what context and so on.
I realized, he was actually so much more interested in it. We went ahead with the preparations, my wife helped him with the correct pronunciations and I helped him with the expressions and the rest we left onto him.
He went! He recited!! He conquered!!!
He won the first prize. Kudos to him!
Surely if he would have given the Rockstar jig a try, he would have done his bit but definitely not won a prize. He would have come out with a feeling no human likes, of being a failure.
The scene at a talent hunt is something we would as parents always been a part of but in retrospection as an onlooker I saw something else.
There were parents, who ran into the first row to prompt the child. Some mothers even were giving expressions which they expected the child to express without any flaws, and when they didn't, they showed their disappointment so clearly on their expressive face, it crushed the child's natural flair and the child completely went into a shell. As for the child, winning that inanimate trophy made of some cheap metal is not at all as important as much as our approval.
Some father's were even biting into their nails, some parents hopped onto the stage and prepared the microphone, the sitar, combed the child's hair and it appeared as if given a chance they themselves would start performing on stage instead of their kids. Some had hired low cost self proclaimed genius choreographers and had the audacity to paint the child blue for Shankar Bagvan's Tandav.
Failing to realize that the child is in pre-school where the child is far from knowing such emotions, forget actually emoting it.
Stop there! Stop it, because in the name of Talent we are hunting our child's inner child and hunting it down badly.
Some shivered, some cried, some scratched their body in nervousness, some just froze. Very few actually were able to carry it off. All that the children were interested in, after the performance, were the bag of goodies they received from the school and eating it off with their friends. Some ran here and there without paying heed to the other performers nor to the teachers who ran behind them trying to control their natural talent of being just themselves.
My three feet younger son narrated the story of The Honest Woodcutter with such good command on his language and with so much of confidence, the front row parents naturally came out with a WOW! Both these guys could do it, for the simple reason that they did what they were good at.
Lets Tap our child's natural talent and if we can't, lets not try to infuse our unfulfilled wishes in form of talent.
Remember, no health drinks, claiming that our child would grow faster, actually ever made a difference to our or our child's growth because no matter what you eat or drink or supplement; you can't grow taller than what your genes are coded for.
So let the growth be natural.
Very few children are gifted with extra ordinary skills and reservoir of talent. The other many are just different like you and me without these special qualities. But definitely we all have something unique and special which only we have and no one else. Just help our child to discover it and we never know we may discover our own.
Till then, enjoy television programs where children are made to compete and display talents and winners are glorified like international heroes....
And in some quite moments when the television is unplugged, think of those thousands who never made it. They are living the hell of being called losers on international television.
©Nozzer Pardiwala. All Rights Reserved.
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