Japanese lunchboxes and Chennai Lunchtime death

There is no question that death of a child, any child, is heartbreaking and inexpressibly sad.  If such death is due to carelessness or callousness, it is even more reprehensible and persons responsible for such negligence should be taken to task.  One such incident happened last Monday, when a kindergarten student chocked to death on bananas during lunch time.  One’s heart goes out to the family.

OTOH, everyone of us will feel good at the sight of school children playfully enjoying their lunch, whether in India or in Japan as in a BBC video.  In the video Japanese moms talk of how they enjoy putting together such works of art; how some days it takes 2 hours to dress them; where to attend classes to become more artistic.


(collage of stills from the video: courtesy the BBC)

There are kitties, monkeys, piano, pikachus, pandas, pianos and what not.  But my favourite is the Sony PlayStation controller. 
;-E

What it brings out is a sad reflection on the way we Indians treat our kids.  I can’t imagine any mom, anywhere in India, especially a working mother, spending 2 hours packing her kids lunchbox.  Matter of fact, I wonder whether working mothers can afford 2 hours cooking for their family on a weekday, leave alone packing lunchbox!

Jokes apart, while I was at the temple today, two elderly babushkas aimed few punches at the family which lost their son in that lunchtime accident.  First the babushkas lined up the background on their fingers:

• The uncle of the unfortunate kid laments that ‘the school  didn’t have a doctor or there are only one caretaker for 45 kindergarteners.’
• The understandably angry father accuses  the school management of negligence.
• Other schools in Chennai ban bananas and several other snacks in lunch boxes, as a precaution.

Then for a few minutes, the old women posed a few laments of their own - Why is that in India today,

1. people seem to wake up to the fact, only after a mishap and never before?
2. people make a hue and cry immediately after the incident and soon forget about it?
3. people in positions of authority and power, swing to impose knee jerk solutions, but fail modify the system for a permanent cure?

By this time, I was down to last few minutes of my meditation and the old women’s discussion was an earful:

• young children are never, ever, given bananas or any other fruits - even apples, oranges or sweet lime - unpeeled or without being crushed/mashed.  We always crush the fruits in our hand before feeding them a spoonful.  Thus ignorance on the part of the person who packed the lunch box too contributed to the mishap.
• parents scramble to admit their kids in a nearby school based on reputation, but do not check out the safety or infrastructure of the schools.  After an accident, they and their relatives start making a hue and cry about the lack of facilities - which they could have checked, if they had the inclination.  After all, no one forces any parent to admit their children in a ‘particular’ school.
• schools imposing restriction on the type and variety of snacks is welcome, but will they keep enforcing it?

Then they cackled, ‘Even the newspaper which has reported about the restriction will not keep a list of such schools and do a follow up, say in March 2012, to see whether they’d been serious.’

As I was leaving, they were extolling about a school they read on the Sunday (4th Dec 2011?) magazine of the Tamil Daily Dinamalar.  Seems that particular school has the practice of enforcing a strict standardized lunch menu for the students, which excludes any junk food including potato wafers etc., but includes such ‘yucky’ dishes like spinach, vegetables and yogurt.

The point is that they remember reading about it before the unfortunate death.  So, seems there are some who do think and care about how they do things!

My Admiring half admits, ‘Why not?  If the Government (of India and TN) can enforce a standardized menu in the mid-day meals at school scheme, why not private schools too?’

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