Child Is The Father Of Man

Readers will realise that the tone of this post is very different.  For a reason.  This was written for another website called Stillness Project.  It is reproduced here.
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Decades ago, when we lived in Hong Kong, I used to see an advertisement for some housing project on TV every evening. Because we neither had the desire nor the resources to buy property in Hong Kong, swan-like, we disdainfully ignored the salient features of the project, but were captivated by the tagline on the commercial — `Let us leave our planet in a better state than what we found it in’. At that time, people were still perfecting the art and science of destroying the earth, so there was no great furore yet about ecological degradation of the earth, caused by man’s greed compounded by stupidity. But what one did not realize then was that tagline represented the initial alarm bells which had started ringing, about the damage being inflicted on our environment in the name of development.

I wish all the saner elements in the world had got together at that time and dinned that singularly important message into the kids growing up at that time – much more aggressively. May be, we would not be staring at the disastrous scenario we are mired in today – what with the reduced green cover meaning highly erratic rainfall, ending up in unpredictable cycles of droughts and floods all the over the world; enormous green-house gases heating up the entire planet so much that temperatures have gone up everywhere by a few degrees (including our own Bangalore, where for the first time in living memory, we recently experienced temperatures nudging up to 40 C); arctic ice is melting and glaciers all over the world are retreating alarmingly.

Simply stated, the previous generations – meaning, we — did not do a good job of maintaining the intricate balance on the earth and now, our children and grand children are paying for that dearly. We were so engrossed in churning out great quantities of gadgets for our own convenience, indiscriminately focusing on the so-called life-changing technological developments that we omitted to lead by example when it came to tending to mother Earth. Alas, on the contrary, we actively engaged in destroying our own planet and our children, who cannot be blamed for seldom holding parents as role models, thrived in our foot-steps in actively pursuing that suicidal mission of destruction.

Now that the damage to earth is becoming more apparent and we are ourselves suffering the consequences, it is gratifying to see that children are asking the inevitable questions as to what we were thinking. But because of the precedent we have set up showing the wrong way, we owe it to the world to also wean our progeny from all those terrible practices prevailing in the name of development.

Today, many of the ecologically driven initiatives in big cities are supported vociferously in no small measure by school children, if you notice. We see youngsters involved in planting saplings in the same places from where rapacious men had felled mammoth trees for some factory or highway. They are refusing to even buy fire crackers for celebrations because of their awareness of the damage they could cause, while grown-ups are still merrily engaged in that pernicious activity. Generally children today are far more intelligent in their use of water or other resources, being a lot more concerned about preserving our planet. It is for the elders to do much more and join the youngsters in making decisions which would help in keeping Earth in good shape.

Wordsworth said `child is the father of man’ and in this context particularly, children can probably take the lead and restore the planet to good health. But, for that the oldies have to work with the children!! That’s the least we can do, after being an active part of the `destructive’ generation.