Attention please!

Cases of suicides, rapidly reciting in the cities luminously highlight the divergence between Parents and Children and lack of communication, writes Suyash Karangutkar.

When a Mumbai-based teen climbed up the apex floor of her building and was threatening to jump down to death, the crowd gathered was as perplexed as I was. Watching scenes live on the television screen, I wondered - what could have forced the girl to attempt such a drastic step? Luckily, two hours later, the police team was successful in escorting her. The crowd deserted but my thoughts did not. I was left mused by bethinking the horrible event.

 It was Sunday’s newspaper which mirrored before me the authenticity behind her attempt. ‘The girl was extremely disturbed’, reported THE SUNDAY MIRROR. The newspaper contained an interview of Shalini Sharma, head of Mumbai Police’s Hostage & Crisis Negotiation Team who spoke and somehow convinced the depressed Bandra teen, that night. “The girl was confused; angry… enough signs for me to get worried. Ideally, I would have spoken to her family about what provoked her to such an extent that she wanted to kill herself,” Shalini told THE SUNDAY MIRROR. “I begun reassuring her that everything was alright, nobody was going to harm her. She couldn’t hear me as there was a lot of noise from the crowd. We somehow managed to pass her a cell-phone, which she accepted. Within seconds, I realized she needed to talk to someone” she added in her statement to the newspaper. “She told me she was depressed because of the problems at college and at home which totally frustrated her,” said a concerned Shalini. 

        

 Reading it, I was reminded off the headlines of an article published in the November, 2012 issue of DNA newspaper which said, ‘MORE THAN CHILDREN, PARENT’s NEED COUNSELLING.’ The same issue also contained news of two teens who committed suicide and their families were unaware of the motive behind their suicide. The same was the case with the Bandra girl, who was just 17 and wanted to share her words with someone. But in this busy scheduled world, no one gave damn to her emotions. A common dialogue that parents absurdly quote after their teen’s suicide is ‘Nothing was wrong with him, he was happy. God knows why he did that. We never pressurized him for anything.’ When parents are said to be the ‘soul companions’ of the children, then why they are they unaware of the reason behind their child’s depression? Why do the parents have nothing to say when their children invite death in their absence? This is because; the modern generation parents have got extremely little time to spend with their children. They really don’t understand how much their children miss them. 

Psychologists have always termed Communication as the key but very few comprehend it. Today, a parent handles their child a mobile phone and communicates with them through it. The depressed condition of the Bandra teen luminously exhibits the increasing divergence between kids and their parents, the lack of communication between them and the escaped love and care.    

Deliberating on such facts, parents need to realize that their children don’t need the latest gadgets more than them. They wait to hear stories and tales and share their ideas from their parents but sympathies to their curiosity. Parents need to understand that apart from job and career, there is a little heart patiently waiting for their arrival. Hopes should not be departed as there is still time to expound things before stipulations start prevailing. 

-          ­The author is the Managing Editor of The News-O-Holic news blogazine. Being a young editor, he writes on crimes, politics and social evils. He is an avid blogger as well! The views expressed by him, in the above article are personal.