RIFLE RANGE BOY

Two things that happened recently made my mind go a-wandering, yet again. Credit: SCMP #1. A friend, whom I have not met for some time now, appeared in my life during the course of my career. About twelve years previously, he became a widower after his thirty-something wife succumbed to the menace of the crab. Left to care for three young girls, ranging from ages of eight to twelve, he took it upon himself to be the sole provider of maternal and paternal love, all lumped to one. With his meagre income and a lot of helping hand from his extended family members, he forewent female intimacy and sacrificed simple pleasures of life to make parenting his sole purpose of existence. Fast forward twelve years later, the girls have managed to attain academic excellence. Each of them is pursuing careers by their own merit in local institutions respectively in medicine. Law and accountancy. It seems like poverty and melancholy never dragged them ...

See what I picked up off WhatsApp... *Parent Induced Wastefulness* (PIW) When parents strive to give their children the best of everything at an early age, they are sowing seeds for materially insatiable monsters that are prone to sloth, apathy, avarice and fear. Don’t stand in self-defence as yet. I have proof. As I sit in my counsellor’s chair day after day I encounter an altogether a new disorder that I have come to label as- *Parent Induced Wastefulness* (PIW). Here are a few examples: * 26-year-old Manas does not want to finish his Engineering degree because he does not ‘feel like’ studying. But he harasses his parents every day for money. He tells me that whenever he did not feel like doing any particular activity, his parents told him he could quit. They always said they did not want him to get ‘stressed’ like they were when growing up. * 34-year-old Raghav is a qualified Engineer and is married for two years but his wife is not ready to live with him hence th...