Whom are you protecting and from what?

Today is some special day in the annals of web viruses or something. The techies in office have blocked all internet access for one day. Might make sense I guess. But I stopped looking for sense in what they do long time back. It’s a losing proposition. Its always a question isn’t it? How much must we be open and how much protection do we actually need. Layers would protect us from the harmful environment but it would restrict us from interacting and learning from it first hand. These are fine balances we walk everyday. To explain one perspective…
Yesterday jasmine told me that Jispa’s drawing class got cancelled. She came home and spent the evening cycling. Ok cool. She then added that she was cycling all alone down in the compound while she cooked at home. OK stop. All alone huh? Yup. I think it was the first time that we might have left Jispa all alone in the building compound. Though Jasmine did admit that she kept a keen eye from above. Now she is 6 and half years old. Kids her age are down alone all the time. Her friends are not from the building, they are all over Matunga. And they are the ones with maids. So she is typically with her friends who have maids waiting over them. Jasmine and I have resisted this maid concept that has caught on everywhere. We don’t understand it and we don’t subscribe to it. I prefer the involvement. It does mean sacrifices on our side. We can’t watch movies; we have to necessarily do things that only the entire family can do etc. But its something we have taken a conscious call for. So Jispa was alone for the first time cycling away. Are we control freaks, were we too late in allowing this or – we let her be on her own without a maid – are we too open. It’s a perspective that each one balances based on their own situation. We would like to open and give her as much freedom to explore on her own. But we have to counter potential dangers on her being alone. I don’t have answers but I do remember one line from an outstanding book on parenting ‘protect where you must, permit where you can’.
This is a simple logic that might just answer most of our dilemmas on balance. It surely helped me!

Post script: as the internet is blocked for almost everything – I wrote this in the morning and miraculously they have opened the internet in the evening as the danger has apparently passed.