Paridhi Chopra
The other day, I got a comic for my 6-year-old. My all time favourite Pinky. The naughty school going smart kid with loads of life skills to handle the mess around her was a role model for kids of 80s and 90s. And I wanted to introduce the character to my kid, who often struggles at school with kids often bullying him. Pran’s comic world had many such characters like Billu, Chacha Chaudhary, Raman that represented the common people and who had extraordinary solutions to the mundane problems.
My son who spends many hours after coming from school till play time alternating between TV and smartphone, doesn’t know how to handle his emotions well while playing with neighbourhood kids. Part of the problem could be the overwhelming visuals and sounds that dominate his mind leaving him little or no time to process what’s happening at school or in his real life.
When I come from office at around 7 in the evening, he is too exhausted to listen to me or do activities with me, forget about learning about life. While reading comics definitely means going into another fictional land, but reading is a better habit any day, which is increasingly diminishing among kids of all ages.
While I still have time to inculcate reading habit in my son, and he might pick it up in his later years, there are challenges galore. In the digital world dominated by Netflix, Amazon Prime and other such streaming platforms, reading has become all the more difficult.
After spending long hours at office, I sometime take refuge in the digital world, immersing myself deep in a recently released web series or a movie. The downside to it is that it eats away my time further, increasing my guilt of not giving adequate time to my kid. My son on the other hand gets additional cartoon-time while I am digitally unwinding.
When for a change I came back with this comic and told my son that I used to read this in my childhood, he asked me to read it to him. As I went down the memory lane, getting the nostalgic feel of my childhood, my kid too laughed at the antics of Pinki and Jhapatlal, asking me more questions about the little girl that’s almost his age.
His grandfather told me that after coming from school that day, he asked him to read a Pinki story and I was more than elated.
I am planning to buy more comics and story books in the coming days to make reading fun for my son, as well to start a digital detox for both of us.