Plutonian Discourses

“Ok, name the nine planets of the solar system” I said during the mandatory science discussion with my six year old.

“There are eight planets mummy” came the confident answer.

“Err..Well there are eight now. There were nine till some years ago. Now, name the eight planets.”

“How?’’ he asked with the curiosity of a six year old trying to comprehend these celestial objects with the unbiased understanding of their small little world.

“How did they become eight?”

“Hmm..there was a ninth one called the Pluto. He was the farthest from the sun and he drifted further away and so scientists took him off the solar system. So, there are eight now.”

“So is he alone now?”

“Hmm yes. ”

He fell silent and a sudden sadness swept in.

“What happened ?”

Teary eyed he looked up at me and said “He is alone in the dark far away. Scientists shouldn’t have done this to him.”

“Nobody did it. Pluto was just far away and he wasn’t really like a planet. He was different. And all planets are alone in space.”

”So what if he was different. It's not fair” eyes brimming with tears.

I suddenly fell at a loss of words. If compassion had a face there it was. To see the world through the child’s eye, so beautiful, words will fail to describe it.

That night when I contemplated on what he said, I was deeply moved, also proud of his innate sense of empathy, a virtue I hold dear. If a child can feel this for a lifeless (albeit we address as “he”) planet which he has only seen in pictures, why can’t we do it for living people around us? Are compassion, altruism, inclusivity so difficult?

We are increasingly being okay with the unjust world and not care about it unless it directly impacts us. We have been conditioned to believe that the ‘I’ is always right, not understanding that I can have my opinion on something as much as you can have yours and be comfortable with it. We have set the definition of the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ in black and while in reality there is no ‘right’ way. There are multiple right ways if there ever is a right way.

While we are seemingly comfortable with our lives, deep within we are all lonely souls. Yet, there are ageing parents left alone, individuals ostracized for somehow failing to fit into the conceived norms of society, people dying of hunger, children begging on streets.

While we do this wishful thinking of a just, inclusive, almost Utopian society and many of us are sensitive individuals, we never really make a conscious effort to alter our world and therefore, continue to be a part of the world that has numbed itself, that has justified the inequality.

We justify this inequality with meritocracy --survival of the fittest, our self-Darwinism, that it will bring in mediocrity, as there will be one not good enough. But when the majority is out of the field, how can there be a fair play? For example a person with no elementary education is not even a part of the race to prove himself.

There are no easy answers, but we can try and find a balance. All of us can be a drop in the ocean, and atleast try and be that full drop.

When a child asks us questions about why a street child is the way he is and why are we like this, or why does the domestic help not sit with us on the table, or why there are no marks for drawing and colouring as there are for maths and science, it makes us uncomfortable. But with the years the questions fade away. Because the child starts believing that it’s just the way things are, which is a sad truth, and a terrible thing to happen to the child.

In absolute wonder, the child will question all that is around. And the responsibility to provide an environment that makes the child sensitive and holistic, to provide spaces that foster open mindedness and interactions lies with us.

As Paulo Coelho said- A child can teach us three things – to be happy for no reason, to always be curious and to always fight for something.” Let us not lose the child in us.