The house that I grew up in had portraits of old men hanging on the living room walls. I would glance at them every time I would pass by them, acknowledging their presence as well-mannered children acknowledge their elders. There were seven of them. At the centre was an old man with a long flourishing beard, wearing a black coat. All the other frames seemed as if they were emerging out of his beard. Another frame had a bald-ish man with a french goatee, and an unusually protruding chin. He was pointing at the crowd below him, which seemed dreamy-eyed, as if under a spell. Then there was the portrait of a man with a thick mustache, wearing a decorated army jacket. He seemed pretty devious. For a while I thought of these men as my ancestors. That was the only explanation a 10 year old could come up with, without having to ask anyone. The portraits had a matter-of-factly entitlement about being there. Asking felt weird. I feared they would turn around and ask, “who is this gawky 10 year old?”
We had a library of about about 2,400 books, as was counted in the last annual library cleaning-cataloguing ritual that I was part of. I would actively participate in it — full of prompt energy, eager to impress my parents, alphabetically stacking the books, victoriously complaining about that odd book that got placed in the wrong pile.
“Papa, pass me that ‘Cam-us’ book, it goes in the ‘C’ stack”
“It’s Cam-uuh”, my father would coolly correct.
The library was my favorite room to hide in while playing hide-and-seek with cousins. The books lining all four walls from floor to ceiling were an efficient camouflage. Or was it the smell of naphthalene balls and rotting paper that I loved. On other days I would casually chill there with no real purpose. The room always felt cozier and warmer than the other rooms in the house. Maybe it was just a place for me to sit and quietly admire my parents. These were the only utilities that the library served in my early childhood. The thick navy-blue bound volumes, with their aging spines and yellowing pages always felt like antiques, only meant to line the walls, but never teasing enough to be picked up. It was not until my mid-teens that I was able to carve out my sub-library within the master library. These days you can find Orwell’s classics marking their territory within the big library-state of Marx.
It was a Sunday. I strolled into the library to get a whiff of the Naphthalene balls. My father was at his desk, and seemed distracted. After a few minutes he picked up a thin booklet printed in cheap quality paper lying on his desk. He handed it to me. The cover said ‘The Communist Manifesto’, and below it were pictures of two bearded men who I recognized from the frames in the house. It was a spontaneous act, lacking any grand design.
“Here, read it. It’s one of the greatest texts ever written”.
‘Umm, ok’, — I took it from him, went back to the room and started reading it. Three pages in, the landline rang. 10 minutes later I was at the park playing football.
On other days, father would make me sit down and get into these long monologues about Marx and Gramsci and Trotsky, about why ‘theory of surplus value’ was such an ingenious idea. I was barely a teenager. Teenagers back in the day used to be slower and dumber by present-day standards. I would just stare at him with sincerity and nod. I tried my best to pay attention, but it was difficult. Now that I think of it, he wasn’t really trying to make me understand, but saying it aloud to crease out arguments in his own head. I was just a prop.
At times when I would be taken in by the frustrations of not understanding what he was saying, I’d straight up ask - “What is communism, Papa?”
He would smirk, his eyes would light up, and then he would go — “Communism is the idea of creating an egalitarian society, which doesn’t let capital exploit labor.”
“Egalitarian, huh?”
“Classless”
“I see. Has there been a classless society ever created?”
“Yes, in Kampuchea”, my father would say. “Everyone eating out of the same bowl”.
I would imagine a football field sized iron bowl filled with boiled rice, and people, like mice, lining up around its rim.
Marx had almost become this father figure for me. Without reading a single text written by him, except for the first three pages of the Communist Manifesto of course, his mention would get me all warm and fuzzy. The thick volumes of ‘Das Kapital’ took up one whole shelf in the library. Staring long enough at them every other day, I tricked myself into believing I had read them.
One of the days I asked my father about the other portraits on the wall. He got excited, and pointed at the guy in the army jacket. “This is Joseph Stalin”, he said. “He was singularly responsible for stopping the Nazi army and Hitler and save the world from the threat of fascism. This was his greatness”. That day onwards I would get warm and fuzzy about Stalin as well.
Now, this isn’t a piece on the moral arguments for or against a political ideology. But certain other questions are pertinent — how much influence should parents have on their child’s thinking? Should there be limits? What should be the nature of influence?
In 1961, Professor Albert Bandura conducted the infamous Bobo Doll experiment which demonstrated that children largely model themselves on the behaviors of the adults. More extreme the behavior, deeper the impact. Jeffrey Lyons, a political science professor at Boise State University also found that if both the parents follow a similar political ideology, their children are likely to inherit the same. “If parents set kids down a partisan path early in life, it becomes more difficult to deviate,” Lyons said. “Once you tell yourself that you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you’re going to interpret information in a way that would reinforce those beliefs.”
Parents, by default have a disproportionate influence on their child’s beliefs and attitude. In the early years certain core beliefs become so entrenched that, to fit-in an alternate viewpoint requires a significant effort of undoing — creative destruction, which probably begins when one enters college, where there is greater engagement with other viewpoints. But the collateral damage of the early years doesn’t get easily reversed.
In Grade V, a new boy had joined my class. He ended up seating next to me. His parents had recently moved to the city. One day, within the first few weeks of his joining, he asked if his parents could visit my house to meet my parents. They wanted to understand the school and the academic structure. I was excited to have him and his parents over. I let my parents know, and they showed up on the weekend. My friend’s father wore a thick bunch of discolored religious thread on his wrists. Their conversation lasted for less than 20 minutes. Me and my friend were disappointed. Too short for us to get more than two rounds of hide-and-seek in the library. Once they left, I heard my father tell my mom, “They seemed too bourgeoise”. ‘Bourgeoise’ was a terrible thing, I was convinced now. With those threads on the wrists, and colorful rings on the fingers, I should have known. That day onwards I could see two red horns emerging out of my friend’s head. I was happy to have seen through the evilness. Parenting is insidious. It needs little for the inception.
My childhood was strewn with labels of political binaries — Left, Right, Communal, Secular and the rest. I used them as shorthands for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ — who to interact with, who to shun, who to be suspicious of, and who to develop immediate liking for, who belonged to my tribe, who didn’t. For a childhood that doesn’t understand nuance, this was almost a superpower. People contain multitudes, wrote Walt Whitman. What is multitudes, a 10 year old would ask.
When children are given a crude shorthand for splitting the world into good and bad, what do they risk losing? What kind of experiences would they be shutting themselves to? The books not read, the weddings not attended, the relatives that remained distant, the friends that never became. I could go on.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. I am not making a bizarre argument for not listening to your parents, or for any sort of absolutist hands-off parenting. Parents, after all are the only chance one has to successfully navigate a childhood and adolescence where so much could go wrong.
Instead, what parents need to provide is “Range”, as David Epstein points out in his book — put your kids on a 10-lane highway, and not a one-way street. Children, he writes, need a breadth of emotions, not the depth of pointed right answers. Sampling before specializing. Take Roger Federer, the example Epstein cites in the book. Federer tried his hands at multiple sports before finally figuring that it had to be Tennis. He was well into his teens when he made the choice. Conventional wisdom about starting and anchoring too early for anything in life could leave a litany of regrets, be it sports, or a philosophical framework. Life, as a trite philosopher defines it, is but an exercise in minimizing regrets.
I am a father to a three year old. And to tell you the truth, I am not sure what I am expecting here. Asking a parent to set aside their deeply cultivated beliefs for some vague idea of exploration? I am indulging in idealism here, I know.
So ‘ideally’, the moral responsibility of parents is to make their children capable of navigating life. Establish the founding principles — kindness, compassion for fellow humans, a whole lot of curiosity, and all the other good things. But never overreach. Parents need to let their children arrive at their own worldview for themselves, and not mould them into becoming copies of themselves. Maybe the worldview that their children sculpture for themselves through the chisels of everyday life would closely align with what the parents hold dear.
The point is to arrive at the idea, and not land on one. It is the process, and not the outcome that is important. As lousy metaphors go — It’s the climb to the peak that defines the peak. Someone who has gotten to the peak in a funicular would never have full appreciation for it. An unmovable rock in the path from the avalanche the night before, an unplanned detour, and one might end up on a higher peak with a more picturesque view of the valley.
A few years back I used to run a company out of Gurgaon. As a law-abiding Gurgaon entrepreneur, my LinkedIn was fairly up-to-date. A connection request flashed. The name sounded familiar. It was that guy from school, the one whose bourgeoise parents had come to our house. He was a VP at a multinational tech company in the same city, his profile said. We exchanged a few messages. He was happy to get connected and wanted to catch up for beer. Both of us unanimously agreed on the choice of ahata, open-air taverns attached to every alcohol shop in Gurgaon. As the joke goes, you can judge a person by the ahata he hangs out at. He was already there when I reached. It must have been 15 years since I last saw him. He had a bright red thread on his wrist. We ended up chatting for 3 hours, which felt shorter than the 20 minutes his parents had spent at our place.
Children, Oscar Wilde wrote, begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes, they forgive them.