The travel was fun, and mostly pleasure. But the work was a dull, boring and fairly insignificant project - and in terms of the time and energy it consumed, just the opposite. The sheer volume of it was inundating, and right through the two months or so that it lasted, I panicked that it would never get done, wept at my foolishness for having taken it up, and several times even pondered suicide as an option, saved only by my foolish conscientiousness towards the commitment!

I needed all the help I could get - and wasn't ashamed to ask for it from my children who chipped in cheerfully and worked to their capacity. So pressed was I to get the job done and out of my life forever, it never struck me then that I may be doing the wrong thing in enlisting my children. They gave a lot of time and effort to it, sacrificing some evenings and all their weekends - even when they had only a month to go before their examinations. At the time, I was so stressed and out of my mind with worry to get it over with, working seventeen hours a day, skipping meals and not even taking the couple of minutes off to visit the toilet that one tends to do in the course of a normal day - that I barely made this connection.

Later, as the frantic pace receded (as frantic paces invariably do!) I tried to view my children's involvement with an objective eye. Had I been selfish in dragging them in to work with me? Or had I merely given them an opportunity to see how adult lives function, and provided them with an experience which would enrich their personality and broaden their perspective?

Was I really any different from those thousands of parents in our country who take their children to work with them, robbing them of their childhood, forcing them to earn a living - sometimes from necessity but only too often from selfishness disguised as necessity?

But somehow, even with all this in mind, even with a strong realisation of how privileged I am and how different my circumstances from those parents, I still felt strongly justified in having taken that crucial time and effort from my kids.

If there is a crisis in the family, should not the children also shoulder their share? Does not that make for closer ties, a great sense of responsibility, a more mature view of the world and the real issues which we all must learn to face? If there is loss or change of circumstance, I truly don't believe that children should be protected from the reality.

Similarly, if everyone in the family goes out to work, why can't the children help out with household chores? Why can't they too sacrifice some time to pitching in to keep the household machinery running smoothly? I would share my world with my kids both in easy times and in a struggle - because that's what life is all about, and why deprive them of that fundamental truth?

Today, education is a top priority for most of us in this country. But I wonder. I see my children rubbing their sleep-filled eyes and struggling out of bed on school mornings, gulping down their breakfast and tottering under the weight of their books as they hurry off to school. They come home in the evenings, still heavy with school work. Their lives are dominated by timetables and exam schedules. Who are we to mock those parents who put their children to work, and speak loftily of the pleasures of a carefree childhood! No, I do not wish to rant and rave at the system and in fact would any day go on record as a great advocate of our Iabour educational methods, with all their faults and inconsistencies. The fact is, unlike in many other countries, our methods do seem to work! Unlike young adults of many other nationalities, those that have been through our antiquated and much maligned system are doing better than the best in every part of the world!

All I want to say is, we do what our circumstances in life oblige us to do. Let's share our lives honestly and naturally with our children too.