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Among the millions of messages that inundated social media and the offline world following the tragic suicide of young Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, a tweet from director Ram Gopal Varma stands out. A majority of the people don’t understand the difference between thinking and worrying, Varma wrote. “Thinking creates solutions and worrying creates depression.” Although the statement seems to be a gross generalisation of depression, it exposes an underlying problem in the way most people approach issues, personal as well as social.
In schools, most children are forced to enter the rat race of achievements and recognition. Most end up becoming people who can’t take failures in the right spirit; they often fail to derive the right lessons from their falls. Several studies have pointed towards the inability of certain groups of children to adapt to disruptive changes at school levels and how they carry this harmful trait to become grumpy, nihilistic people who skirt owning responsibility for their misgivings and failings. Instead, they see themselves as victims of external situations. Clearly, such attitudes don’t help people get the better of themselves. Hence, it is important to raise our children to accept failure and help them derive the right lessons from it. As things stand now, our school curricula do not help in personality development.
Teachers and parents should enable children to be independent, emotionally as well as socially. While most parents push their wards to be achievers by subjugating them to hard training in schools and beyond, they let the children become emotional parasites to their parents by micromanaging their needs, desires and decisions around friendships, recreational activities, social interactions and such.
As a result, the kids grow up emotionally weak, and when failures visit them they crumble. Worse, most stay away from discussing such situations with family or friends, fearing comparisons and rejection. This must change, and the change should start from our homes before it gets too late.
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