The child told me that as you grow older, your attention span would decrease, and that is the reason that he is not able to study well! Wondering from where he got this theory, i looked questioningly at the mother. She told me wryly that it was a line from Garfield, the comic cat, who was her son’s favourite cartoon character.
Though i was very amused at the whole thing, it set me thinking. We have so many profound statements being made by cartoon characters, and if a child is going to imbibe them as life-truths, then we would indeed have a tough time! What we would need to instil in the child here is the quality of discerning what truth is, and what fiction is. Fantasy world is something that all of us escape to, at some time or the other in our lives. I guess it would be called some form of escapism, but then if we do not attempt to get back to reality, then it would become a problem, not otherwise. Going into the fantasy world gives us a break from the harsh realities of life, but we need to walk into the garden of fantasy as in Alice in Wonderland, equipped with the key to come back through the door, and not lose the key. I guess we are also programmed to dream for the same reason. But what happens when we do go into this world and adapt it to be our real existence? Then it becomes a pathology. In this world, we are at liberty to frame our own laws, live life the way we want, and have complete control over the entire universe. It is such a wonderful feeling, of being in control!
We are able to become super beings that have super powers; we have the supremacy over all that we behold, be it money, relationships, power... we call the shots. This euphoric feeling would be the like of being God: (Remember Bruce Almighty?)! However, even he was God only for ten days!
The crash of coming back to reality is softened, if we are emotionally healthy, and equipped with coping skills to deal with the real environment. We then understand that what happens in the world of comic characters and the dream world looks and sounds good: but maybe too good to be true, and the real world with its share of miseries, misfortunes, missed opportunities and disappointments is still worth living in. For it is definitely much more concrete and less ethereal than the world of magic and fairyland and glib one-liners. So whether it is the wisdom of Garfield, or the precocious philosophy of Calvin, give me the real-world caricatured human beings anytime: I can take them head-on!
Mohana Narayanan
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