Two Minutes Older: Let Them Roam

'Free-Range Kids'. I don't know about anybody else, but to me the term sounds slightly sinister. I can't help thinking of chickens, piglets and lambs skipping their heedless lives out in sunlit pastures while waiting for their hideous -if humane -end on someone's table. Of course, if you've read Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Eating Animals, you'll take my romantic notion about what `free-range' means with a sack of salt. But this is not about food.


I first heard the term `free-range kids' a month or so ago, when I was resentfully wiping off cycle chain grease from my hands. I had driven my son and his cycle to his friend's place. (I have been resigned for some time now to driving him around if I wanted him to have any friends at all.) Though these friends stay reasonably close by, I didn't consider it safe for him to cycle there by himself. Hence my annoyance at having to chauffeur the kid and his mode of transport around.


I was also being contrary. ``When I was young,'' I began, aware that I was sounding like every detestable adult I knew when I was a kid, ``we didn't have our parents hovering over us all the time and telling us to be careful.'' My friend nodded sympathetically, and handed me a rag on which to wipe my greasy hands. Then he threw out the phrases ``helicopter parent'' and ``free-range kids.'' And he told me about the concept.


It's the title of a book by American writer Lenore Skenazy. The term describes her approach to a specific kind of hands-off parenting. Working on the premise that the world is no more dangerous than it was when we were growing up, Skenazy suggests that what has changed is our perception of it as being less safe for children than it actually is. This is how she let her son be a free-range kid: she left him -then a nine-year-old -at Bloomingdales, gave him money and told him to take the subway back home. Alone. America was horrified. Other parents thought she was being irresponsible.


It is true that we allow our children less space than we ourselves had. In 2008, in an article in the Daily Mail titled `How children lost the right to roam in four generations', David Derbyshire wrote about the members of one family in Sheffield in the UK. He discovered that in 1926, while the oldest member of the family, then age eight, was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing, the youngest member, in 2007, also eight, was only allowed out 300 yards without supervision.


In my time, I would have cycled the distance I had driven my son, but I wouldn't and still won't -let him do the same. He goes for music lessons to a place nearby and I drive him there and back.


Could I bring myself to let my son walk to his music lesson, allowing him to take the time out to explore his surroundings -which, for what it's worth, consists of overflowing drains, potholes, traffic and a few shops along a very busy main road -and become a confident and self-reliant child in the process?


I suspect not. I certainly want him to become a self-reliant young person, but sending him out alone to walk or cycle on Hyderabad roads is more likely to turn him into a gibbering wreck of a human being.


I could be wrong. I suspect I am. What if I taught him to take buses, to ask for and remember directions, to use a public phone? What better way to teach him to live in a city than to allow him to navigate it on his own instead of protecting him from it as if it were a temporary residence we'd leave behind us some day?


Suspicion and fear take root easily enough. The ways in which cities have changed are evidence of it -gated communities, extra security and the ghettoisation of once-mixed localities. Anyone who makes a case for resisting this tendency to fear everything in order to be safe is worth listening to. Besides, I don't want to be a helicopter parent.


(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

Hospital Catalogues #9: (This is not a poem)

1. The Indignation of Space Bar

When we walk in, a guard makes a swishing pass and hands us a token and a form. The automatic doors remain respectfully open while I try to figure out why we need all this to enter a diagnostic centre. Inside, I tell the person at Billing that we are here to consult Dr. V and am told to take a seat.

A few minutes later a secretary-type person in a blue sari comes and asks if we are here on a repeat visit. I say again what I said at Billing. She tells me that things have changed since we visited last (I already figured that, thanks) and that we now need to register, Rs. 50 valid for 3 months, all doctors.


What? WTF?!

This is one notch up the corporatisation of hospitals: earlier, you just had to register once and they gave you a patient number and a file, which you got to keep no matter how many times you visited. Now, some Hospital Management type is clearly earning her daily wage by thinking up new schemes to make the place more money: 50 bucks every quarter.

Will they give us a new file three months and another registration fee later?

Unless you're some extremely ill person, it's unlikely that you will need to visit a diagnostic centre more than a couple of times a year. Heck - even middling-ill people need diagnostics only once every three months. Any other time lapse needs a hospital.

"Yes, they need to make money. Fair enough," says our doctor, when we go in to see him. Right. After their cut of his and other doctors' consultation fees, and the tests, they still need that 50 bucks for the file and letting us sit in the AC for 15 minutes.

Bah.

(Not that I was pinched for 50 bucks, you understand. It's not my makkhi-choosiness that's under discussion here, but theirs.)

2. Deja Vu

Hospitals (and diagnostic centres), like malls, have a continuous subterranean growl that never goes away no matter how many plastic plants they festoon the place with or how hard they try to make it look like nature's waiting room.

The first thing my mother has to wait for is a blood test. I know I'm equally worried because I know how hard it is to find a vein for her. I tell her, anxiously, to start a torniquet even before her name's been called, so it's not as agonising as it usually is.

I hate needles. My dreams turn into nightmares when they make an appearance, all dancing eyes and sprouting blood.

I sit outside - grateful for the tiny space inside that bars my anxious hovering - and watch other people emerge with their arms folded at the elbow. I think I detect a whiff of blood behind all the alcohol.

With my father, I used to force myself to watch. I think it was because it was better to be inside, where the blood was being drawn, than outside where the smells from the canteen mingled sick-makingly with other hospital smells.

Fasting blood sugar tests done, I miss that very same canteen most sorely, where my father used to have pongal, or masala dosas.

When you step into a hospital, kiss goodbye to a couple of hours of your life. And always carry a notebook.

The woman in a blue sari passes by and I smile gratuitously at her. In two minutes, she comes half-running to say she's arranged for my mother to skip a long queue for the ECG. I feel very pleased with myself - clearly, I haven't lost my touch. I am the Machiavelli of the hospital waiting lounge, armed with a file and a smile.

ECG and X-Ray done, we prepare to leave. I ask the woman-in-the-blue-sari when the results will be ready. "This evening," she says. I tell her I will return tomorrow in the morning, since we have to see the doctor anyway. She tells me that we don't have to get a token, since it will be a repeat visit.

I smile. It costs so little. And ask her her name. I leave with another name it will take time to forget: Padma, Nagalakshmi, Kasturi, Nasreen and now Ashwini.

And to think I considered just dropping in to say hello to my father's doctor.

As we leave, I notice for the first time, that there are many old and not-yet-opened machines outside, either waiting to be discarded or inventoried. I hope I never have to know, first or second hand, what they're for.

3. Oh, it's nothing serious

Just a frozen shoulder.

But I knew the routine last night: all medical files, credit card, insurance number, charged phone. I suppose I'm glad I know what to do.