Children are the best imitators, which makes them the most malleable, impressionable and vulnerable creatures on earth.
The truth really hit home when my brother bit off the end of a chili and rubbed it into his eyes, when he went shopping with my dad.
When he came home, Abhi's face had swollen and it took water, cold drinks and ice creams to pacify him.
My dad told me Abhi took his inspiration from watching me having pickled chillies at a Turkish restaurant the previous day and decided to try some.
Later that night, Abhi gave a little squeal of terror, turned towards me, mouthed "chilli went inside" pointing to his mouth and eyes and made a crying face.
That made me realise just how significant each of our actions is in the larger perspective.
Here in Mumbai, recent days have seen three youngsters, aged 11, 12 and 18 take their lives.
The first was 11-year-old Neha Sawant, who was a contestant in various reality dance shows.
Newspapers deliberated over whether her suicide was due to her parents pulling her out of dance shows to concentrate on studies, but this is disputed as it happened over a year ago.
I personally think that a girl as young as 10 should never have been allowed on a reality show, as that inevitably put her in an adult world where she must have had to face adult problems and pressures.
Whatever the reason for her suicide, it broke the heart of everyone who picked up the Mumbai Mirror on January 4, the front page of which featured a picture of her, barely taller than the guitar she held in her hand.
The following day a 12-year-old boy hanged himself in his school bathroom, apparently because he was afraid of facing his parents after failing four of the six subjects in his mid-semester exams.
The day after that, an 18-year-old girl also hanged herself, apparently for the same reason.
The Indian educational system is again under scrutiny for being very rigid, focusing more on the scoring of high marks rather than developing children's talents and skills.
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), New Delhi, the board I studied under in Bahrain, recently announced that it would put an end to the board exams for Year 10 and 12 from 2011 and would evaluate students on their holistic performance throughout the year.
While this comes as a relief, it will make hardly any difference as only a small fraction of students in India study under the CBSE while the greater majority are in state boards that emphasise learning by rote. Another heart-rending story was that of a 12-year-old Afghan girl, broadcast as part of the BBC's My Country series. Gul Pari, whose name means 'fairy flower' in Pashto, is a drug addict, just like her mum.
Under the Taliban, opium production and consumption was prohibited. Now, with the country 'liberated', its people torn by war, hunger and violence, the trade is flourishing.
The last scene showed Gul Pari and her mum in a rehabilitation centre, where she expressed her wish to live her childhood like everybody else.
Just before the credits rolled in, it was revealed that she and her mum had fled the centre and their plight was not known. When we hear of tragedies like these we realise how children are being denied the childhood that is rightfully theirs to enjoy. Arthur C Clarke, in his book Childhood's End, says that humanity will lose its future when it loses its childhood. "For the heart of any race is destroyed when its children are taken away from them," and he wrote. We don't yet have Big Brother breathing down our necks, but there are smaller beings who observe all our deeds and duplicate them - for better or worse. Let innocence prevail...
¥ Jennifer is a former Bahrain resident now studying in Mumbai. Her family still live here.
Copyright 2010 Al Hilal Publishing & Marketing Group
'Tragedy of Stolen Childhoods...', Gulf Daily News, January 8, 2010, Jennifer Gnana
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