The Conniving Filmy Kids #MondayMusings

Today I am going to tell you a story about 2 children who  enjoyed a happy childhood.

They grew up in the era when children being spanked by the parents was a widely accepted norm and they were okay with it. Their parents had divided departments between them to take care of their children’s spanking needs. While the father took care of their education department always demanding them to turn up with the subject’s books they were respectively weak in and the mother took care of the minor disciplinary departments referring the major ones to the father thus broadening his area of responsibility. Still the kids were of the opinion that they were kind of well off compared to their cousins who had more instances of deadly violations by their parents.

In addition, these 2 kids were quite fighters in themselves who fought each other with intense rage and animosity. There wouldn’t pass 2 days when they wouldn’t be seen armed with bats and thick sticks screaming and running after each other, replicating the likes of action sequences from the HIndi movies of those times and uttering – “Main tujhe chodunga nahin! Main tera khoon pee jaunga!” with blood-thirsty eyes. Their father always threatened to send one of the two kids to boarding school if they continued to display hostility with each other and that both of them will crave to see each other, used to terrify them to the hilt. If this would have happened post Dabang then their dialogue might have been – “Ek doosre ko na dekh paane ka sochne se darr nahin lagta Papa Sahib, darr to boarding school ka lagta hai.”

However, when the frequency of the threats crossed the decent time frame of getting executed, both of them mutually reached the conclusion “Papa ke pass lagta hai paise-waise hain nahin ki hum main se ek ko bhi boarding school bhej sakein to darne ki koi zarurat nahin“. The fights continued and so did the threats and what vanished was the fear.

The exact year is not certain but one fine year they started the tradition to declare one day out of the 365 days as non-violence day. The legalities of this non-violence day were –

1. One non-violence day was permissible per child per year.
2. That day would be the birthday of the child.
3. The meaning of non violence was none of the other 3 members of the family – the other child and the parents, will raise their hand or any other movable property of the house on the birthday kid.
4. The above clause was binding upon the birthday kid in no way.

What I had never been able to understand was how come their parents also bought their concept of non-violence day? Nevertheless, it was a good enough arrangement for both of them which continued in its original format for a long time.

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Last week, it was Dhruv’s 6th birthday. As soon as he walked into the living room after waking up in the morning, still rubbing his eyes yet wide awake, he told me he had planned to watch lots of TV that day since it was his birthday. “Oh, yes! Why not?”, I said and granted his wish.

Staying true to my character of being the unrelenting mother when it comes to TV viewing, I got the TV switched off after 2 hours.

Those 2 seemingly innocent kids, long before they became conniving, with their father who was enjoying his phase of unchallenged authority at the time of this photo.

Linking this post to Monday Musings hosted by Corinne Rodrigues

and #MondayMommyMoments hosted by Dr. Amrita Misra and Deepa Gandhi.