A personal reflection on slow fire, high pressure, and the forgotten art of letting children grow
Dr Arun Prakash
I grew up in Sarai Hari Ram — a small village near Phulpur, about forty kilometres from what was then Allahabad and is today called Prayagraj. Phulpur you may have heard of. Famous constituency. Nehru’s seat, VP Singh’s seat, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit’s seat. Big names, big history.
But when I was a boy growing up in Sarai Hari Ram, not a single house in the village had electricity. The high-tension wires ran right over our fields — we could see them, hear them hum on quiet nights — and yet the villages below them sat in darkness, as if the modern world had decided to pass over us rather than stop.
My mother cooked on an open fire. Dal was a long affair — an hour at least, sometimes more, the vessel sitting heavy on the flame while she kept watch beside it. There is a reason we say daal galna as a proverb for something slow and hard-won. Because it really was. You could not rush it. You could not will it to be done sooner. The fire had its own pace and the dal had its own time and that was simply how it was.
Today my wife puts rice on one burner and dal on another and in twelve minutes, both are done. Pressure cooker, gas stove, and the kitchen moves on. I watch this sometimes and think — what a thing. What a genuinely wonderful thing. I have no romance about the old way. It was tiring and slow and my mother deserved a better stove decades before she got one.
But here is the thought that won’t leave me alone.
Somewhere along the way, without quite deciding to, we started cooking our children the same way.
High flame.
Sealed lid.
Full pressure.
And we wait for the whistle, fully expecting that a finished, accomplished, successful human being will be sitting inside, ready to serve.
I wonder if we have thought this through.
There is a girl I know — I’ll call her Shagun. She is ten years old, bright eyes, a little quiet, loves to draw.
Her mother is one of the most devoted parents I have met. She spent months, real months, working to get Shagun into the right school — the kind where judges’ children and collectors’ children study, where the right connections are made, where the right future supposedly begins.
And then, once that was done, the real schedule started.
Music on Tuesday evenings.
Piano on Thursdays.
Art on Saturday mornings — because someone told her mother that art is good for brain development, so art it is.
Yoga on Sundays.
English speaking classes twice a week.
And over all of this, like a sky that never quite clears, the pressure of school itself — tests, rankings, comparisons, the endless question of whether Shagun is keeping up.
I have met retired officers with lighter schedules than this ten-year-old girl.
And I want to be clear — Shagun’s mother is not the problem.
She is the most loving person in this story.
She is afraid, the way most parents today are afraid.
Afraid that one relaxed year will become a lost decade.
Afraid of Sharma ji ka beta, who is apparently doing everything right.
Afraid that the world is hard and competitive and her daughter must be armoured and ready.
I understand this fear. I have sat with hundreds of parents who carry it, and I have felt something like it myself.
And before someone accuses me of nostalgia, let me admit something.
The world facing today’s children is genuinely more competitive than the one I entered. Admissions are tougher. Careers are changing faster. Technology is reshaping professions at a speed my generation never experienced. Parents are not imagining these pressures.
The fear is real.
The question is not whether competition exists.
The question is whether piling more pressure onto a child is actually the best way to prepare them for it.
But armour, when it is too heavy, does not protect.
It pins you to the ground.
Every year, after board results, something terrible happens somewhere. Not everywhere, not to every child — but often enough, and in enough cities, that we cannot keep calling it rare.
A boy who was the studious one, the dependable one, simply stops one day.
A girl who had everything on the list develops anxiety so severe she cannot enter a classroom.
Panic attacks at thirteen, dismissed as drama.
Depression that nobody named until it was too late.
Child anxiety, academic stress and burnout are no longer problems we read about in newspapers. They are appearing in ordinary homes and ordinary schools.
And afterwards, the same bewildered question from everyone who knew them.
But he was doing so well.
But she had every opportunity.
What went wrong?
What went wrong, often, is that the child was never asked what they wanted.
They were only ever told what was needed.
We step in quickly when children struggle. We solve problems before they have fully understood them. We smooth the road because we love them. We remove obstacles because we do not like watching them suffer.
And yet some of the most important lessons in life come from wrestling with difficulty, making mistakes, trying again, and discovering that you are stronger than you thought.
Children do not grow only from support.
They also grow from the confidence that comes from overcoming something on their own.
So what does it look like when it goes right?
I have been lucky enough to see it, once, very closely.
At DPS Korba there was a family — Mr and Mrs Rao, and their two sons Anil and Shekhar.
Mr Rao was not a science man. Not an engineer, not a doctor, not someone with any particular technical background. But he watched his sons the way a good farmer watches the sky — quietly, attentively, reading signs that other people walked past.
He noticed where each boy was struggling, not to scold them but to understand. He would sit with them, find questions from exactly those difficult areas, work through them together — not because he had all the answers, but because he believed that figuring things out together was better than one person pointing and the other following.
He never once, as far as I could see, told those boys what to become.
He only ever helped them become more of what they already were.
Anil is a doctor in the UK today.
Shekhar is an engineer, doing well, moving forward steadily.
But what strikes me most about both of them is not the qualifications — it is that they seem like people who know themselves.
Settled.
Rooted.
Not performing a life someone else designed.
That, to me, is what Mr and Mrs Rao actually achieved.
They walked alongside their children, not ahead of them pulling, not behind them pushing.
They were companions on a journey the children were always meant to lead.
In forty years of education I have not seen parenting done with more grace than that, and I salute them both from wherever I am sitting when I write this.
My own childhood was, by today’s standards, close to unsupervised.
My father was in another city, home for two or three days every few months.
My mother stayed inside during the day.
Once I stepped out in the morning I was free — completely, wonderfully free — until I came back in the evening.
Nobody tracked me.
Nobody scheduled me.
I wandered, I read, I got into things, I made mistakes, I tried again.
My path was not planned. It was discovered, the way a stream finds its course — not because someone drew it a map, but because it kept moving and the land kept answering.
I am not saying every child should be left to wander without any guidance.
The point is that somewhere in that unscheduled time, in that space where no adult is directing the scene, a child meets themselves.
They discover what genuinely interests them.
What bores them.
What pulls them in.
They build, quietly, an inner life.
And that inner life is what carries them through everything that comes later — far more reliably than any number of coaching classes or carefully arranged achievements.
A child who has never had that space grows up not quite knowing who they are without a schedule.
At twenty-two, when the structure falls away and the world asks them what they want, they have no answer — because nobody ever asked them, and they never had the quiet to find out for themselves.
Let me come back, at the end, to where I started.
To my mother’s kitchen in Sarai Hari Ram.
To the open fire.
To the dal that took an hour and could not be hurried.
Anyone who has eaten dal made that way will tell you it tastes different.
Not because slow is always better — my wife’s twelve-minute dal is perfectly good and she has earned every one of those twelve minutes.
But that old dal, made on fire with no shortcuts, had something in it that pressure cannot produce.
It had time.
It had patience.
It had the particular quality of something that was allowed to become itself.
Your child is not dal in a pressure cooker.
They are something that needs time and light and a little room to be surprising.
Your job is not to make them done faster.
Your job is to stay close, pay attention, believe in them more than you fear the world, and trust — really trust — that they are growing, even on the days when you cannot see it happening.
Your child is not a project to be completed faster.
Your child is not an entrance examination waiting to be cleared.
Your child is a human being becoming.
Some things simply cannot be rushed.
Children are one of them.