Last week, there was social (un)consciousness of sorts created when the media reported that Shinjini Sengupta, a 16-year-old girl from Kolkata, had become the first medical victim to the real pressures of the reality TV phenomenon.

Unable to withstand being rebuked by judges for her not-so-great performance on a reality show on a Bengali channel, Shinjini had apparently withdrawn into a shell. She had stopped having her meals and was not talking to anyone at home. Her family said that she had lapsed into a state of depression, holding the judges responsible. Their harsh attitude towards Shinjini on the tube, they claimed, had edged her toward depression.

That parents more often than not try to live their unfulfilled dreams through their children is a known fact globally. And it is this that often drives otherwise “reasonable” parents to push their children towards pressure situations.

The advent of reality TV in India has proved that behind every child participating in front of an unknown audience is a set of ambitious parents who are ready to sweat it out for their little ones. The adult-like behaviour of seven and eight-year-olds and their ilk only proves the effect that parental conditioning can have on impressionable minds.

If parents can instill killer confidence in their children, what stops them from going ahead and drilling into their heads in the same fashion that not winning a show or losing out to someone else in the finals is not the end of the world?

What stops them from reassuring their progeny that the loss didn’t happen because they weren’t talented enough? Or because they weren’t a hit with the judges, thereby denting their confidence?
But then, psyching out a seven-year-old enough to act mature and do calisthenics/gyrate/spew inane dialogues in front of a discerning audience is one thing. It is altogether another thing to expect little soldiers to adjust to the vagaries of life and take loss of pride and defeat in their (little) stride, which even mature adults fail to do so often.

Renuka Chowdhury recently said that reality shows would be brought under government scrutiny to ensure that children participating in such shows were not “over-burdened”. The Union Minister for Women and Child Development had expressed concern at the conditions to which the talent pool was exposed – long hours of shoot, food given to them, sleep etc.

And she had a bloody good point.

At a time when they are supposed to get their hands dirty, literally, in the mud and get drenched in the rains or play pranks on their older siblings, sometimes parents too (personally speaking!) and engage in other childlike pleasures of the world, they are undergoing a Kafkaesque metamorphosis, shedding shyness, inhibition and innocence for precocious behaviour that comes along with instant stardom and fame.

And this will continue.

Till the time middle and new India continues its flirtatious escapades with reality TV which has made many stars and heroes overnight. Till the time parents stop expecting the world out of their kids and push them.
And till the time someone says, ” Parents, leave the kids alone.”

This originally appeared here