Dear children, here’s a letter to you

By virtue of my personal inclinations and professional domain, I end up counselling quite a few students. If I add to that my own experience of growing up, I find one commonality in all of it. That a lot of kids think that grown-ups have done amazing things and that they themselves are newbies who are good-for-nothing. It takes lots and lots of bad experiences basically seeing one’s heroes and idols crumbling in one’s eyes to believe that ‘Hey, I’m not too bad myself’.

So here’s a message I want to give to those kids: Children, you are the most beautiful, pure, innocent human beings there are. You are told you need to learn from us but I wish we could learn a thing or two from you! Your curiosity, your sense of wonder, the purity with which you process good and bad, right or wrong is unadulterated until some of us come and colour your eyes. We force feed you connotations and impressions, stereotypes and hatred and in doing so, we snatch away your innocence and what made you truly unique. We turn someone who could have been a teacher into a student, and a bad one at that, one who is discouraged from asking questions, one who is taught to quietly rote what is fed.

I know that you feel you have done nothing and that all adults have achieved great things. No, that’s not true. We make you feel that way because we fear you, we fear how good you can be, how you will come and demolish us from our fragile perch. As you grow up, you’ll see that your most popular actors, journalists, politicians, businessmen, lawyers and celebrities don’t have half of your innocence, in fact they got there by killing most of it. They made compromises, killed their ideals and values, all for some form of gain. As of today, you have power. The power to be who you want, the way you want, you can change the world. You can fail all you want, that’s not ‘failure’ but wasting your potential by not even trying is. Don’t go by the rules we force upon you, don’t go by what we tell you can or cannot happen, most of them are apologies for the things we never tried, there are no rules as long as you are confident you are doing the right thing and aren’t harming anyone.

Go build your lives the way you want. Explore, learn, unlearn, forgive us for we do not intend to harm you, it’s just that we couldn’t stop the chain and ended up becoming who we once blamed. Your flight is infinite and I hope you follow that one beautiful thing that resides inside of you - your pure, innocent, beautiful heart!