One of the most learned members of our clan, Uncle Shan RIP, was once working as the head of a reform school for juvenile delinquents. In his later years, long after his retirement, he used to reminisce about some of the exciting situations he encountered as a counsellor. I remember one such scenario.
By and large, the school inmates were of extremely high intelligence. The only problem was that their true potential was hijacked by negativity. A teenager was admitted after being caught breaking into a home with his friends and sent to reform school. Uncle Shan used to have pep talks with him. The message that stuck with him was what the young man had told him, "if only my father had smacked me on the head the first time I came back home late, I would not have spent how much time outside and got entangled into the wrong crowd!"
The children do not know what they want. Oh, what the heck? Even adults do not. That probably prompted Steve Jobs to say about mobile phones, "People do not know what they want, we will tell them," when one of the designers queried whether customers would buy into their groundbreaking designs on a device named iPhone.
Michael Jackson lamented that he never had a childhood because his father prepared a gruelling, back-breaking regime to make superstars out of the Jacksons. The fact of the matter is that Michael never grew out of childhood, having been caught in a Peter Pan syndrome trapped in Lala land. Michael would not have attained what he had if not for that early bone-bending manoeuvres. The world would probably not have known about Moonwalk either.
Now it seems that the woke culture has permeated every level of society. Of all professions, one would think that the predominantly conservative and cautious medical community, whose motto 'primum non nocere' (first, do no harm), would be guarded against joining the woke frenzy. Apparently not!
It is puzzling why over such a short period in our civilisation, there is a rush to squash what society has planned over millennia, gender separation. Gender is fluid and binary. Pigeon-holing individuals into gender stereotyping is discriminatory, they say. There is an urgent agenda not to assign gender but to allow children, as early as pre-schoolers, to explore, and discover their true gender, not the biological ones they were born into but with which they align psychologically. But at such a young age?
At lightning speed, the medical fraternity is prescribing hormonal therapy and even gender re-assigning surgery to correct the so-called 'Nature's error of gender designation. But guess what, with all the wisdom and breakthrough discoveries that scientists claim to have, early inventions have proved disastrous in many cases. Puberty springs in and offsets the whole arrangement. Then the person is really trapped.
