Parents, Nature and the Future...

My two boys with their cousins Adeep & Eshan

I often take long evening walks with my wife and our two children. We are proud parents of two young boys aged eight and four years. As parents we often worry about them – their education, desires and ambitions and the values they learn. I wonder about what my eight year old son thinks when we go on such walks or what rummages through the mind of my four year old. 

On one such evening walk the sky was slightly overcast with a smattering of white and grey clouds over long patches of blue. My elder son pointed to the blue in the distant sky and asked me, “dad, what is that?” I encouraged him to find the answer by himself. “Think about it”, I told him. After a few seconds he answered, “Sea”!

My wife merely smiled at him. As a doting young mother, she neither wanted to correct her son nor wanted to reprimand him for being silly. I took up the job and explained to my son that the blue in the sky was nothing but sky itself. He looked at me with disbelief. He wrinkled his brows and looked one more time at his ‘sea’. Taking the geography lesson further, I told him that seas are a meeting place for many rivers. Bhutan is a landlocked mountainous country and the majority of its people have not seen a sea. To people living in the mountains, seas are in the sky, in the tiny imagination of a child or even the matured fantasy of an adult.  

“Where is the sea, then?” my son continued. “Can we go to see one?” I drew an impromptu map on the footpath and showed him where we were as a country. “Look, this country south of us which looks like a taproot is India. And on the shores of India we can find the sea”.

I remember the first time I actually touched seawater was when I was attending an international training programme on rural development at Pataya, Thailand. I think it was the South China Sea. As I cupped up some water in my hands I had been disappointed. The water in my hand was not blue but grey, brown and dirty. “Where is the blue sea?” I had wondered as I surveyed the coast of the polluted sea.

In the mountains we feel much closer to nature and everything that comes with it – worms, insects, beetles, butterflies, birds, animals, grass, bush, trees and mountain after mountain. In my country religion is a way of life and mountains are everywhere; where one mountain ends another one begins. And religion and nature have a common path and a peaceful co-existence. We name our mountains and highlands after gods and goddesses. Gods and goddesses in turn protect our mountains, passes, valleys and the wild. There is a reverence between man and nature!

In Bhutan going on a picnic means sharing food with the birds and the monkeys. I often feel sorry for the many men, women and children around the world who have not seen a tree in the wild, touched a beetle as it claws its way out of the dung, seen a bird carry twigs to build a nest on the areca nut tree, or fed rice husks to the tiny tadpoles and school of fish in the mountain streams.  

My son is in standard III. He has seen nature from a close range. He has heard nature in its natural tone not just through the narrations in the National Geographic channel. He has seen monkeys jump from tree to tree and not squeak in tiny rusted iron cages in the zoos. He has seen birds fly about in full regalia and not merely flap their wings at the call of the jester in the park. He has even seen a snake when one crossed our path on our way back home after visiting my sister in the village. Last December I took him on a vacation to the neighbouring Indian town. There we saw a motley crowd gathered around a bearded man playing on his gourd pipe and a grey snake slithering around in apparent dance steps. My son was scared of the snake and terrified of the charmer.  

However, my son has not seen the world. His world begins at home and ends at his school classroom. He has recently been introduced to map reading as a part of his environmental studies. He now knows that there are many more countries besides Bhutan. He recognizes the map of North America when I show him a slightly flattened photocopied version of the map; for that is how his teacher introduced the map in the class. He finds it hard to understand that in many parts of the world people drink water from a bottle. He finds it amusing that cows in other parts of the world deliver condensed, powdered or packaged milk for he has seen the cows in our village give white and delicious liquid.

Lately, my elder son has started showing interests in news and current affairs. As with most child of his age, he watches a lot of television. Although Cartoon Network with its myriad of characters and Pokemons is his favourite, he often ventures into Natural Geographic and Animal Planet. At times he is compelled to sit over BBC and CNN with me. He finds an analogy in much of what is shown, be it CNN or Animal Planet. “In your news I see that people are killing other people. In Animal Planet, I find one animal killing another”. He looks at me. I know he is looking for an answer.

Today my son cornered me again. He asked me, “dad, what is earthquake?” I said “earthquake is a shaking of the earth…” He folded his tiny eyes, looked at me curiously and asked, “How does it happen?” Now, I have forgotten my twelfth standard geography except for the formation of an oxbow lake. “Don’t worry”, I said, “you will learn about it in your class five or six...” He was not convinced. He wanted to know then and there. I was caught on the wrong side of my intelligence. This was not the first time either. He did it the day-before when he wanted my analysis on the content of the TV channels. Within 72 hours he caught me napping twice. How long can this pretension go? How far can I be a hypocrite? How long do I pretend to be a walking enclyclopaedia??  I quickly gathered my composure and said, “I don’t know. I have forgotten the details…”  

I know he was not satisfied with my stance. I have a feeling that from that day he has begun to realize that his old father doesn’t know everything after all. To an eight year old, his father is the epitome of knowledge and a reservoir of answers. Last month when my son asked me a question and I was unable to answer, he had remarked quite dryly: ‘didn’t your teacher teach you about this?” At his age he is able to find answers to most things that he needs to know from his teachers. He would expect that I would have been taught everything by now. I think at the end of the day, it is better for your son to realize that his father is no know-all fellow. I feel much better since the day I decided to give up.