Saturday, September 08, 2007

The Nexgen Kids and the need of the hour...

"Give a brand new mobile to an eight year old and you'll get to learn a few new things that you could do with your mobile from them. "
"You sit thinking what was that model of the car that just passed by, and before your brain can even start querying your database theres a reply from the young one there explaining the model,, the engine power and its other variant models."

Yeah, I am talking about the next generation kids...Oops my cousins daughter Raksha (Age 3) would be angry if she heard me calling her a kid. She calls herself a big girl. She was here a few hours ago and as soon as she entered out house demanded me to give her a paper and some color pencils. With no small ones at home, I couldn't locate any color pencils and could only manage a few normal ones. She asked me what I would prefer for a drawing and I said, anything she wishes. She said she will tell me a story about a man called "do job" and along with the story she drew a nice cute little face built around the words "do job", the d and b as the ears, j as the nose etc. Then she came to my room and saw the white board I have installed. She dragged me around all the way from the kitchen to my room, demanded the markers, and asked me to move my cot near to the board so that she could climb on it to write it on it. Her mother came along and asked her if she would like to write the English alphabets on the board. She immediately obliged and started from A, B, C, D...and completed with X, Y, Z in a neatly managed two lines. My parents were amazed so much reminded me that even after reaching Class 1, I never used complete all the 26 properly and made me feel ridiculous.

I saw the video recorded on a personal camcorder on Raksha' s third happy birthday (as she calls it) a few days back, and noticed that its not only Raksha who is smart and intelligent; almost all of this generation kids are. She wanted to host a cute little party with cake cutting and stuff at home for her birthday and herself invited all her cutee little friends. I saw in the video the fun, and games all the little ones (yeah almost 12 of them) had during the course of the party and realized that with a great depth of exposure to city life, technology and what not, kids these days have become really much much smarter than we were during our days.

While its a very good sign for the future of our own society and country, theres also another side to the story with so many poor kids who don't get a chance to get, leave alone the exposure, even the basic education. Who is to be blamed? One side India is consistently clocking an economic growth of over a nine percentage, but still theres no respite for the poor. The economic divide in the society is, I believe, slowly increasing and is not going to do any good in the long run. What I mean by economic divide is the gap between the rich and the poor. While the government and corporates are taking some steps in defeating this disturbing growth, responsibility lies in each and every one of us, who enjoy the sweets of the so called Incredible India, to share and help our lesser privileged countrymen. As its said little droplets make a large ocean, one should not worry about how small is the contribution and continue with whatever one could manage. I think this is the need of the hour and hopefully the youngest country in the world rises to this challenge. I would make sure that I give my share towards this cause for sure...Will you? Think about it.

2 comments:

Meens said...

Yeah.. it's so true that the next gen kids are all so smart .. like we never were at their age. They are bolder and fearless. My friends and I have discussed this many times.. how their confidence takes us by surprise and sometimes leads us to feel they are being impudent, while many times they are only being themselves and fearless. It's unfair that while the well-to-do family kids can have every little moment of happiness in their lives captured as high-quality videos to be viewed in the future and enjoyed, there are children who will grow up to find they have nothing to call childhood even. A blog that will set some people atleast thinking and set them into action, that will make definite difference in this world which would mean so much to those children benefitted.

Magesh G said...

Very true. The confidence these days kids show is indeed unbelievable.
And yeah, if this post even makes one person think, I feel happy and it would have served its purpose.