Unbelievable

Nury Vittachi’s inner brat is finally vindicated

POLICE OFFICERS are using catapults to fire balls of chilli powder as a crowd-control technique, the Indian media have reported recently. Well that’s funny, because I did the same thing when I was a kid and my teacher denounced me as a troublesome brat who would achieve nothing in life.

OK, so her prediction was on target, but I should STILL get royalties, right? I was feeling stung by that when a reader sent in a news item that pressed the same button. A guy in France is suing his boss for boring him. The plaintiff claims that the four years he spent working for the guy’s perfume company were so mindnumbingly dull that they caused him physical harm.

My mind raced back to my high school history teacher, Mr Mohan, who was so boring that you could actually feel your brain fossilising into limestone as he spoke. Once he scheduled a history double period and not even the brainy kids turned up for it. Death would almost certainly have been inevitable, but any miraculous survivors would not have been allowed to sue, oh no.

Now, FINALLY, this generation’s adults are seeing childhood episodes as things to take seriously. Following the success of the Anger Room in Texas, several countries offer ‘tantrum spaces’ where you can scream and shout and smash up stuff. They quote psychologists saying that destroying property is a vital outlet for emotional release blah blah blah. Well thank you very much for realising this DECADES after I spent my childhood standing in the corner. At last modern kids have the terminology to argue their case.

TEACHER: You just burned down the school. KID: Destruction is a vital outlet for emotional release blah blah blah. TEACHER: Good point: here, have this gold merit star. Bottling it up is dangerous. I refer to a news item from the US about an incident in Colorado when police used pepper spray to subdue an outof-control kid aged eight. His mother said they should have just reasoned with him, but that only makes sense to people who’ve never had to deal with eight year olds. Pepper spray is the MINIMUM force necessary. A preferable option would be to run to a safe distance and then approach the kid with a bomb disposal robot fitted with a speaker.

“Put down the axe and we will send an adult in a hazmat suit to read a Winnie-the-Pooh book with you.”

It seems to be boys who grow up with the trickiest challenges these days. A Chinese folk tradition called Fu-Ji requires children to use a Chinese Ouija board to summon an evil female spirit. But Chinese law says males have to wait until they are at least 22 to get married.

So calling up a she-devil is fine, but marrying an actual woman – whoa, guys, this might be dangerous, let’s wait ten years. (Not sure if that is bizarre or actually very smart.)

Whatever. Now excuse me while I go dig up my catapult. My kids are running amok and I need to do some crowd control.

So calling up a she-devil is fine, but marrying an actual woman – whoa, guys, this might be dangerous