As the television show Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Li’l Champs snakes to its finale tomorrow, March 1, snapshots of a season of melodrama flash through the mind. Curiously, these pixellated memories have nothing to do with the show’s music; they have everything to do with children becoming adults in the blink of an eye under the arc lights, and adults grotesquely driving them to win at any cost.

Witness the burlesque of contestants glibly thanking India’s janata, especially the people of ‘their’ states, for voting to keep them in the contest. Remember how contestant Smita Nandy’s father suffered a heart attack when she was eliminated from the show? Recall the brazen declaration of a parent, Mr Doshi, that he had computers across cities dedicated to sending votes for his daughter and that he spent Rs 70,000 on SMS votes.

Watching the parents’ strained faces you wondered if they had ever told their children to give their best joyously and not treat the contest as a life and death matter. Would Mr Doshi’s daughter consider herself a gifted singer after losing out on instant stardom and wealth? Or would she call herself a ‘loser’ — a popular term these days — without even having discovered her individuality?

You see it everywhere. In ‘friendly’ sports matches, parents berate their children for not showing the killer instinct. A child drawing a purple sun is given a timely lesson in realism, as if it were a geography lesson, not an expression of her unique perception. We live in result-oriented times; if a child is not able to use her gift to compete and win, it is of no use. Competitiveness is not explained as doing one’s best, but as vanquishing the other. All this is done in the garb of encouraging potential.

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