It is the habit of a man I know to come across and give a bottle of something nice to an older gentleman in Delhi, sometime in the early New Year. He’s been doing it for years, but not so long, as he always points out, that he can consider his debt repaid. He worked for him in the long-ago, and credits the older man for setting him on the path to prosperity.

It may well be true and it’s certainly nice for the other man to hear. This time, there was also something to celebrate. The gifter’s daughter had been accepted to a world-famous institute, the admissions process of which is as rigorous as the monetary rewards at the end are tangible. I asked him whether she’d had to work hard, or whether she was one of those “natural” talents of which legends are woven.

His child, it transpired, had been slaving away for years with just this end in mind, her parents behind her at every step of the process. There had been tutorials, holidays sacrificed, other treats foregone. “We really pushed her,” he mused, with perhaps a tinge of regret in his voice. But the alternative was a “life of mediocrity”.

And that’s clearly no life at all.

Entry number 3,612 in the similarity folder between India and China — parents push their kids. Over here in China, the weight of expectation is just as life-threatening as at “home”. Beijing, like Delhi, is a big university town. Legions of young people flood in every year. Well, those that get in. When they don’t: Do students kill themselves over here as well?

At the higher end of the spectrum in China, there is an entire industry catering to tiger parents who want nothing but Ivy League or Oxbridge for their prodigies. Tutoring in languages, etiquette and deportment; masterclasses from visiting scholars and performers in various performing arts; even sports hand-picked for their perceived appeal, like fencing, dressage and squash — the process starts absurdly early. There is one mother harassing a consultant of my acquaintance who wants only Harvard for her son.

The child is six.

So that confluence of ambition, money, and extreme stupidity is rare even in India and China. But it is also a fact that one of my son’s classmates was diagnosed with anxiety that has been traced directly to the child’s parents and their expectations.

My son is in third grade.

What are people so scared of?

Easy judgement is a marker of privilege, of course. The blithe assumption of superiority by those secure in their own educations is only the more galling because it is unacknowledged. And it is easy to dismiss another man’s aspirations without having known the paucity of his actual options. (Let’s leave aside the thorny question of “aspiration” itself for another date, and agree for the moment that people should be free to choose what they lose sleep over.)

Even so, when that man who began this story used the word “mediocre”, was he referring to his own life, in some way? He lives well, makes a ton of money, has given his family everything. The horizon of his ambition, like hundreds of millions of others in China and India, has expanded dramatically in the last 20-odd years, to the point where — within reason — he can decide where to set it.

That he, like so many others in both my countries, measures success purely materially is troubling, but also moot. His life isn’t circumscribed by the circumstances he was born to. That is a triumph in itself.

But what if he was referring to the life he lived before he’d “made” it?

Ambition is shadowed by fear. We know this. It isn’t merely the fear of failure, which is ever-present, but also the rejection of what-lay-before, the terror that a false step consigns you to the way-things-were.

China has been through precisely the sort of “hard-resets” that erase actual histories and substitute others in their wake. Now, as its citizens are finally given the chance to choose their forward plans, so to speak, can they be blamed for putting their faith in Vuitton and Yale? Good things in the here and now, and a kid (or two) who dreams in English, is at home in the outside world, with both feet securely in the future — what better way to banish the nightmares your parents still have.

What’s our excuse?

Our civilisational fractures are millennia-old, of course. Caste, religion, class, race, sex et al — we’re not distinct in having them, only in how well we’ve nurtured them. It takes talent to keep a wound alive without letting it scab.

What is different is the opportunity open to the relatively common man to make a change in his own life. I don’t believe it’s just economic “reforms”, by the way; give credit to the great churn set in motion by giants like Dr Ambedkar. Fractures like ours need time to heal.

But the terror persists, obviously — the fear that the moment will be missed, that the chance will be gone. And one’s children will live as their parents did.

That is the challenge, then. To take the fear out of the equation. We all need to believe that the moment isn’t transitory. That there won’t be a hard reset.

Making it true: That’s another story.

Avtar Singhwas formerly managing editor of The Indian Quarterly and editor of Time Out Delhi, and is the author of Necropolis

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