This is a story of two families. Both their stories, as it happens, have to do with academics, but they serve to illustrate a point. The first case involves an old college friend of mine, Anjali, and her husband, Prakash. Even while we were students, Anjali was a happy-go-lucky person who was supremely unconcerned with academic achievement. It is true that she passed all her exams, but she set no great store by the quality of her performance, which was generally mediocre. Within a couple of months of graduating, she met and married Prakash, and settled down happily to the business of rearing a family and looking after a home. Prakash’s attitude to academics was no different to his wife’s. Having got their son and daughter into reasonable schools, they left the education of their children in the hands of these institutions. Never were the children badgered to do their homework or to do better in class or even encouraged to read ‘good’ books. Indeed, the parents themselves read nothing more than the newspapers and the odd magazine.

According to the laws of probability, both children should have ended up like their parents — happy, well-adjusted people, but academic duds. In fact, the opposite happened. When we last met them, we discovered that both children had covered themselves with scholastic glory! The son, Varun, having finished with the IIT, was proceeding to the States where he had won a scholarship to an Ivy League college, and the daughter, Vimla, had got admission to a leading medical college. Both, it appeared, were academically highly ambitious and were determined to shine in their respective fields. They were, in fact, the very antithesis of their parents!

In contrast to Anjali, Gomati, another friend, was a brilliant economist, fiercely competitive and obsessive about education. She met her husband, Gautam, a physicist, while they were at university abroad. Determined to provide their two sons with every academic advantage, they elected to continue to live in England. They sent their boys to very superior schools, and also saw to it that they received every intellectual stimulus possible, in the form of museums, exhibitions, art galleries and concerts, to which, in the name of education, the boys were willy-nilly dragged. In addition, the house was filled with books and records, all of the type to excite the mind. Where Gomati and Gautam were concerned, they were very clear about their ambitions for their sons. They would do brilliantly at school, proceed to university, and then work in some intellectual capacity.

Sadly, the future that their parents had mapped out for them failed to materialise. The older boy, Ramesh, finished school and got into a rather mediocre university. Within a few months, to the horror of his parents, he had dropped out of college to join a rock band. The younger boy, Ravi, did not make it even so far. One hears that he is on drugs. Both boys have left home and the parents rarely see them.

Generalisations are always a mistake and it would be unjustified to draw any real conclusion from these two stories other than the fact that life can be perverse. Nevertheless, I cannot help wondering whether, in the shaping of our children, benign neglect is not more effective than setting impossibly high standards.