kokoroZendo

Manu, Prince Aslan and the World of Narnia..
Was trying to watch one of those meaningless Chinese martial art movies over the weekend. Switched off when I had realized I was missing Manu’s presence. Manu was in Mysore for his well earned vacation after all the “Hard work  “, he had put in @ his Montessori, Karate, Chess and Painting classes. ( He still has enough energy in his reservoir to fight with Rishi, his younger brother and ransack my bookshelf )… Watching together a movie was a routine that started happening quite recently. One Saturday night, as I was putting away a book I was trying to read , I had realized that Manu was still watching TV.

The moment he saw my shadow, he had his ready plea coated with that sweet 1000 W smile. “Papa, this is not Cartoon. Narnias, why don’t you see? It’s good.” My 4.5 year old son is well aware of his parent’s concern over his overindulgence in the world of Power rangers , Spiderman and Ben 10. I could not say no to the best salesman in the world, even though, I do shy away from watching movies based on the good books I have read and liked. (The only exceptions probably were Godfather and Gone with Wind.).

The movie was almost coming to an end. There was this scene when Trees starts moving to help the heroes. And I tried telling my son that rational aspect of the world. It is just a movie and Trees can’t move. He looked at me quite amused at my incredulity and chastised me saying “ Papa, when Lion can speak English, trees can run too.” That was quite water tight logic; I didn’t have much of an answer. For the rest of the movie, I just watched the movie. The punch line was yet to be delivered. The moment the final scene , where the protagonists got transposed back to the London Underground station came, he got up and announced that “Magic is Over and it is time to sleep.”

Even though I am quite aware that we human beings are wired in our brain, to distinguish between a photograph and actual person, a movie and real stuff, I felt it was quite incredible for a young kid to make sense of it quite intuitively.

As Buckminster Fuller had written “All kids are born geniuses, and we elders degeniuse 9999 out of every 10000. “

Then it is not just about Manu. If we really look around, it is not that difficult to notice the great innate light of talent and inborn wisdom in almost all the kids we come across. That light starts fading away, when they start the formal schooling and get them oriented towards meaningless achievement. When we ( yours truly and my better half Thara) was looking around for a place to stay, the only criterion we had was we should be staying near to a place where there is a offbeat school. And we had settled down on Kanakapura Road.

Even though there are many things we don’t agree upon, one of the things we did agree was, whatever the circumstances , we do not want our kids to live their lives to fulfill our own unfinished script, our own unfulfilled ambitions , to rewrite the stories of our own failures and half successes.” We don’t want to them to live remaining part of our lives. We wanted both Manu and Rishi to chart their own course and write their own script for themselves, creating magic in their own Narnia worlds.