ANNIE KOSHI

An older student allegedly slit the throat of a younger student in a private school in Gurgaon, in a bid to get exams and the parent teacher meeting postponed. A 14-year-old was found dead in a washroom of a private school in Delhi, and his parents have alleged that he was beaten to death by a group of students at the school. A government school teacher in Delhi was reportedly stabbed to death by two students in front of their classmates, after one of them was rusticated for low attendance.

We always tend to chronicle in gory details these deeds of our children, but rarely pause to record and mourn the passing of innocence and all that once epitomised childhood. They fail to see the link between the polluted landscape, the vanishing of parents from homes and the sad cries/acts for attention of children. Much like the parrot in Tagore’s Tota Kahini, society has had no qualms in suffocating children into high rise buildings, or in converting their play areas into glitzy malls and parking spaces.

Steps taken after the Gurgaon murder by the authorities only serve to highlight the popular perception that safety can somehow be bought for our children through gadgets, that the ‘bad people’ are the poor or the men. So both CBSE as well as the Directorate of Education issued guidelines asking schools to install CCTV TOMORROW: The psychology of violence