Collect like an Egyptian!

The way I live, which gets reflected in many of the posts here--like even this one--my life is about experiences and memories.  I live my own life, on my own terms--even if it means pissing quite a few people off and living a lonely life.  (which is why only this guy now remains as the commenter at this blog!)

The friend comments that I set the bar too high for people.  I tell her that I cherish my existence,  I understand that I have only one chance at this.  When it is all over, it is all over.  Do I really want to then let the precious moments slip by?

There are all kinds of memories that we create and experiences that we have.  Take, for instance, music.  Even this past December, when I met with a few old classmates from the growing up days in the old country, I talked to a few there about how it was in Chadru's home that I heard for the first time ever music by a group called Abba.  Chandru's parents owned a record-player. I remember that LP experience so well.

Or the mixtapes in my possession that I still play every once in a while.  The tapes of opera and polka music that David made for me.  David who is only a couple of years younger than my father perhaps found in me a kindred spirit who was interested in that kind of music and, therefore, spent time making those tapes for this much younger friend of his.  Or the mixtapes from the graduate school friend, Praveen.

Music--especially the ownership of music--has created so many memories for me.  But, life has been changing fast.  Young and old these days do not own music, but merely rent it.  Well, that is if they even bother listening to music given the time they spend on Facebook and Instagram and on all kinds of fake news.  (BTW, in contrast to Barack Obama who is a music aficionado, do you think this current uncultured asshole of a president even listens to music?  If not music, what does soothe the breast of this savage president?)

This new relationship to music is more than merely about music itself.  It says a lot about how we define life:

What we take for granted today will disappear tomorrow. And the internet brings with it the potential for cultural destruction on a scale previously unfathomable. Do you want to trust the preservation of music to Apple and Google? Do you think they value it the same way you do?

Whether it is music or friends, we do not ask ourselves what we really value.

People do not create their identity out of what they borrow. They view themselves in terms of what they possess. That’s why Egyptian pharaohs and other prominent ancients got buried with all their stuff. And if they wanted music in the next life, they sometimes had the musical instrument buried with them — and perhaps even a dead musician who got a fast-track ticket to the great beyond.

It is one crazy world in which we live.  It is not really about the mere act of possession either.  If only people will understand that ultimately it is merely memories that we can take with us.

I am beginning to hate the zero-tolerance approach

There aren't enough minutes left in my life to list all the mistakes that I have committed.  Small and huge that affected other people.  I vividly recall many of them, and I bet there are more that I don't remember but which the affected parties recall all too well.  Some in elementary school, a few more in high school, and more in college.  These do not even include the works of the devilish idle mind when in the home environment--at my parents' or at grandmother's or ...

There is a fair chance that in most of those situations, the teachers and the elders knew that I was in the wrong, even more than I knew that I was in the wrong.  I bet they gave me a pass because, well, kids screw up all the time.  Some kids screw up more than other kids do.  I would have presented them with a problem if I were not learning from my screw-ups and, instead, were getting on the road to hell.  As long as I was not a repeat-offender, so to say, and as long as the errors were not way off the chart, what I did mattered not much to them.  It was not zero tolerance.

School kids are way more restricted now, it seems.  It is awful.  Even universities seem to be even more protective and less tolerant here in the US than how colleges were back then in India.

I thought I had seen and heard it all, until this flashed in my newsfeed:

9-Year-old Boy Who Passed Love Notes to Girls Threatened with Sexual Harassment Charges

Are you f*ing kidding me?  If a nine-year old boy cannot pass love notes to a fellow classmate .. That's the preciousness of a little romance!

Let's check in with his mother; what exactly did the love notes contain?  Can we have an example?

"How she wears the same uniform and how her eyes sparkled like diamonds," his mother said

Seriously?  If only I had known as a fourteen-year old to compare her eyes to sparkling diamonds!  He is nine years old!

But soon, she says other students started teasing her son about wanting to see the little girl naked.
"That's when the principal proceeded to tell me that it wasn't appropriate that he was writing the note and that if he writes another note, they are going to file sexual harassment charges on my 9-year-old," the mom said.
Hillsborough school district said the boy wrote more than one note and that the notes were unwanted, so that borders on harassment.

Of course the other students would say such things--kids act out in many ways.  Adults then correct them ... but threaten with sexual harassment charges?  They are a bunch of nine year olds, dammit!

The boy--and his classmates--need to be educated on not bothering other kids of any gender.  I wish I had been taught that when I was nine years old--heck, even when I was twenty years old.  That kind of important behavior-correcting education is different from the threat of sexual harassment.

Mild-mannered love notes sent by nine-year-olds do not constitute sexual harassment, and the principal who thought otherwise needs his safety-paranoia meter recalibrated.

Exactly.

We adults do not seem to be discussing important matters like these and are, instead, happily entertaining ourselves to death when not working ourselves to death!  Or, at best, we are scaring ourselves :(

Parents are told almost daily that their children’s health, welfare and safety are at risk, not just from strangers lurking in the park but from adults they know and thought they could trust, including family members, teachers, doctors and volunteers – and the apparently ever-growing menace of online grooming and abuse. Given this state of affairs, how could parents not end up being fearful and paranoid?
How should we, as adults collectively, think about how best to protect and care for children while at the same time challenging and testing them in creative ways? Why do we find it so hard to agree on a ‘commonsense’ approach to child-rearing? ... How might we find ways to develop character, determination and independence of thought and action in future generations?

Now, all I can think is this: thankfully, I am way past the years of youthful follies and, even more thankfully, I am way past the years of raising a child! Phew!!! ;)