Bonding or binding

August 2 was friendship day. And, this yet-another American contribution to our society has caught the imagination of young, urban Indian children.
My daughter, all of 7, asked me on August 1 if I could buy her “friendship bands”. I knew I had to face this someday. She had made a neat list, dividing her friends into “apartment list” and “school list”. So I took her out and started checking out this ultimate form of consumerist culture. The first one that caught her eye (and mine too) was a colourful beaded band. The busy shopkeeper, who was already handling four other buyers of such bands , quickly came out with a “thirty rupees” madam. “what?” I asked, not sure that I heard him say Thirty rupees. He repeated, with some irritation, that it was thirty. I was flabbergasted. Thirty for a band. And my daughter’s list showed 17 friends, and two extra bands! This meant I would be shelling out Rs 570 for those bands which would probably be redundant after that friendly exchange of bonding and binding bands!
I started looking around for a cheaper variety. Though my daughter loved those beaded ones, I had to distract her to some colourful ones, which were cheaper. But they, too, were in the Rs 15-20 bracket. I was not willing to spend so much for these strands of colourful threads, even if they were tied to my daughter's emotions. Then, my searching eyes met a narrow red ribbon roll with best friends written throughout. So my job would have been to just cut the roll into 17 plus two bands. I found that exciting because the entire roll was Rs 25, which meant I could make roughly 25 bands with that! My daughter, of course, looked disappointed, but was not really protesting. Then we both settled for a Rs 5-band.
The actually tamasha began in the evening of August 2, when the children gathered near their play area, each tying the bands on one another’s wrist with a “happy friendship day” wish.
This prompted me to think how peer pressure is fueling this level of consumerism among this generation. Birthday parties are no longer “at home” with cakes, potato chips and samosas. They are at Mac Donald’s or Pizza Hut. And the return gift is no longer an éclair, or a small bar of chocolate. There is a scramble for the right return gift to be “with it”. The kids are found discussing what they got as return gifts at different parties.
Welcome to new-age parenting. Whether we inculcate good value-systems and discipline or not, it is becoming imperative to throw the best birthday parties. The peer dynamics is making its presence felt even more severely kids growing up in gated communities. Parents, too, are not shying away from pandering to their kids’ consumerist desires as they do not mind spending for their children. So if parents can pay a rent of 20-30K, it is obvious that their kids will have playmates whose parents also earn in the same slab. So affordability is bound to be in a specific bracket. But at the same time, demands among children escalate (with one wanting to emulate the other), and this leave the parents helpless.
When we were kids, our friends cut across class. So we were as comfortable in a friend’s plush apartment or even independent house, as we were in another friend’s rented one-room house. And, the peer pressure was not so ruthless because there was a system of checks and balances among the friends.