Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Seeking Attention

This comes from a real life incident that happened recently.

We visited their home after a long gap. The only kid in the family was naturally the centre of our attraction. After some initial period of pause, the boy opened up and started playing with the guests. He was chatting, showing off his toys and running around. It was then that his grandfather arrived from his morning walk. As the old grandpa sat down and started talking with the visitors, we noticed something unusual. While the kiddo was mixing up well with the guests and also talked some times to his parents, it so happened that about ten minutes had passed and the kid didn’t talk to the grandpa even once. He seemed to be too excited to see the visitors and was engaged in other things, and hence naturally forgot the need to talk to his grandpa at that time.

Now there he was running and passing in front of the grandpa, still not looking at him. What happened next was shocking. We saw grandpa raising his one leg and catching the kid unaware. As the kid fell down, grandpa raised his other leg and caught hold of him. The kid, realising that he had fell down and his fun had come to an interruption, started crying. Now grandpa got up, pulled the kid up in his arms, wiped out tears from his cheeks and played with him to stop his crying. The kiddo still said in his hurt and tears: “grandpa made me fell down…” But grandpa seemed happy and content now. What I quickly analysed the incident into, was a very sad realisation.

It seemed to me that the grandpa was an absolute self-satisfying attention seeker. When the kid whom he loved so much didn’t give him any attention, he created a situation where the kid had to be consoled by him and hence he would get enough importance that he thought he deserved. Was it because he, a retired professional, was missing his ‘important’ days on job? Or was it his true nature where he craved for attention from others and if not provided gratification, would do ‘something’ to fetch it for him? I remember a piece of news from some place in Europe where an elderly couple had a unique and perverted case. The husband kept administering a kind of poison to his wife for years, so that she kept on felling sick and he got chance to nurse her! Their marriage was not going on very well and he had devised this method for them to come ‘close’… It seemed to me that a similar game was put on here in front of us. The child was made to pay enough attention and importance by being interrupted and harmed, and the retired grandpa didn’t miss such an opportunity to fetch out some moments of gratification for him. While all of us know how children cry and create scenes seeking attention of elders, this case of a similar but more perverse behaviour from an old man made me wonder.

Of course truth is more interesting than fiction.

- Rahul

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