Ahmedabad's summer of discontent

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal"><script language="javascript">doweshowbellyad=0; </script><br />AHMEDABAD: Deprived childhood acquires a new meaning. Deprived not of the good things in life, but because of too much of it. Vacations are no longer for ‘doing nothing’, they are more hectic than normal school days.<br /><br /><img align="left" src="/photo/616376.cms" alt="/photo/616376.cms" border="0" />Seven-year-old Kirti Agarwal has registered for six summer workshops – tennis and swimming lessons in the morning, sketching and personality-development workshop in the afternoon and skating and computer classes in the evening.<br /><br />All this comes for a price – Rs 15,000 per month.But Kirti’s father, Suraj, thinks this money is well spent. "If she stays at home, she will waste time with her cousins and relatives, its better she goes out and learns something," he reasons. <br /><br />When quizzed about her near maniacal schedule, Kirti, however, cannot feign her displeasure. Making a long-face she says, "These holidays don’t feel like a vacation. During school I wake up at 7 a.m., these days even though its vacation time, I wake up at 5.30 a.m. That’s not fair!"<br /><br />This is a common refrain among children this summer. From workshops to personality improvement classes and trekking camps to vacation special batches at cultural centres, the city is teeming with packaged activities for children.<br />Now you rarely get to see children reading borrowed books or gather in the nearby parks for a quick game of tag or football with the neighbourhood kids. All thanks to parents who want to teach their kids time-management and acquire new talents.<br /><br />Twelve-year-old, Arpita Vaidya, thinks going to a friend’s house and whiling away time is not her idea for an ideal vacation. She prefers learning some latest designing software or going on a camping trip <br /><br />Dr. Vinod Goyal, a child psychiatrist explains, "When parents send their wards to innumerable workshops and activity classes, what they are actually doing is fulfilling their own incomplete ambitions."<br /><br />"Most parents want their children to excel in everything that they do. The result of this constant pressure to succeed is a deprived childhood," he adds. <br /><br />There was a time when the emphasis was on fun and games rather than learning a whole lot of activities to have a competitive edge.<br /><br />Manju Menon, a parent and a teacher at St. Kabir School reminisces, "As children, we used to wander around our locality, eating mangoes, skipping, playing hide and seek and generally having lots of fun with the other kids during vacations. Where is all that now? Today parents want fancy vacation workshops for their kids." <br /><br />At every nook and corner, one can find different hobby classes for a plethora of activities like cooking, animation and software development, fashion designing, painting, skating, yoga, aerobics, English speaking and various other activities.<br /><br />"Our classes get booked in just days after they are announced," informs Seema Majumdar who is the coordinator of children’s activities at Darpana Academy, which has a variety of activities from theatre workshops, drawing, handicraft making to poetry recitation and dance. <br /><br /><formid=367815></formid=367815></div> </div>