Dear Child, Don't Change

We are in a huge hall. Spacious, airy, with large open windows. The hall is divided into two parts. One part is meant for the spectators, who are mostly parents. The other part has four large anti-skid mats placed at a distance from each other. At the head of each mat, a little away, is a table with two chairs facing the mat. Towards one end of the hall is a stage which is set with a table and a few chairs. Certificates and large trays holding medals are placed to one side of this stage on a smaller table. At the back, hangs a large banner with the name of a Karate school, welcoming one and all to the District Level Karate Tournament.

As spectators settle down, children gather at the other end of the hall, answer the roll call and settle down in the different batches they have been segregated into. Some of them are very young, with barely all the milk teeth in place. Some others are older. But their faces are similarly angelic to the younger ones, yet. And then there are the oldest of the lot. Who look grown, but you only need to take one look at their smiles, and you would know they are children still, merely little innocents!

As the tournament begins, the batches take turns going to the designated mats – four matches take place simultaneously, results are declared and then the children walk away to the back of the hall, making way for the next batch of children to have their fights, which, by the way, are called Kumite (pronounced ku-mee-tey), as I am told. And so it goes. While two children fight on each mat, others of the same batch, two or three of them depending on the batch size, sit on either side of the mat, watching the action.

Apart from their usual Karate uniform, children also wear full protective gear for the fights. This gear – helmet, gloves, chest guard – gives a sense of relief to the parents watching the fights. Children though, feel all tied-in and clumsy in it. But all the same, the protective gear stays.

Not all children own this protective gear or the Karate Kit as it is called. So they share it with those who do own the kit. And sometimes, after one round of Kumite, children remove their protective gear and hand it to the next child who comes to fight.

And that is a beautiful sight! It is wonderful to see these little children, get out of their protective gear and carefully help the next child wear it. 

You need to actually see it to feel it, maybe – but the irony cannot be lost on anyone who is sensitive enough to understand, that these children fight each other for points, for winning, for the medals awaiting them on the tray on the stage! And they are the same ones helping each other on with the protective gear so the other doesn’t get hurt!

And what's more, when the tournament ends, while the parents scramble to take pictures and compare who won the gold and who got the silver; the children are seen goofing around, playing tag, chit-chatting with each other, with nary a worry about who won what prize!

How beautiful is that! How innocent! And how different from the behaviour of a majority of adults! 

No wonder, childhood is often described as the best time of one’s life. And children have always been compared to flowers because of how beautiful their innocence is. For the purity of their thoughts, the sensitivity they show – a rarity among adults, surely.

But why? Why do people change as they grow? Why not stay the same humble, sensitive souls that they were as kids? But that never happens. And no one knows when or how, but gradually, every single one of us turns into monsters. The degree of monster ‘ness’ varies, though. There are jealous monsters, there are envious monsters, there are judgmental monsters – and then there are really, really bad monsters no one wants to talk about! Some monsters are better than the others. But all are monsters in the end.

And childhood? Childhood is free of all this monstrosity. It is the time when the only thing that matters is how long one gets to play! When the only thing worth fighting, is candy! When the only way to show anger, is to throw a tantrum! And the only way of life, is love! Love in its purest form!

I wish we all stayed like that even when we grew. I wish, we never lost sight of that love. I wish, that we looked inwards and decided not to feed the monster that takes us over eventually. I wish, we took pains to not let the monster in, in the first place.

Children, often by their behaviour show us the right way of doing things! And I wish, that we saw, really saw, and learnt from children, how to model our behaviour – rather than insisting on the other way round.

And I wish to tell every child who is sensitive and caring and innocent and loving – dear child, don’t change. Don’t grow up to be a monster, even to the smallest degree. Don’t grow up to lose your ability to love, to care, to feel for others. Dear child, please, don’t change.