simone diya prabhu
My four year old niece's big black beautiful eyes stay transfixed to the 21 inches of instant nirvana. A kaleiodoscopic flurry of images and symbols exquisitely fashioned to seduce the mind and engage her in a surreal cell. She is like a supersponge, not missing a anything, picking up the latest commercial and hindi movie tunes and singing them effortlessly. No, she goes beyond that, she re-mixes them to suit her tastes, Chak de, Chak de, Chak de, Chak de sare gum becomes Maama (that's uncle in tamil) Maama, Maama buy me bubble gum. She has Pokemon tee-shirts, Barbie pants, Tweety baseball cap and loads more of cartoon character driven apparel and accessories.
She is a child of mass consumerism. She has been that since maybe her umblical cord cut was wiped with a Johnson wad of cotton dipped in Dettol. No,actually it was much before, I had made sure my sis listened to BMG or Sony music promoted 'Music for the unborn child', soothing western classical music guaranteed to make your child a mathematical, science or humanities genius. You cant go wrong with research, Harvard and MIT types have for years espoused the positive effects of listening to classicial music and how it makes children more intelligent. Simone you see had no chance, she listened to BMG promoted classical music from the womb. Now she is an infant DJ, mixing tunes and spewing them at will. She is onto Harry Potter presently and in love with Radcliffe from the looks of it. If Potter drinks Coke and chomps on Kellogs, she will demand that she be fed the same diet.
But not all is lost. Ask Simone, as to who she likes, Tom or Jerry and she would smile lopsidedly and say Tom. Ask her why and she says she feels for Tom as he always gets the wrong end of the deal. He never gets to devour Jerry and instead has a plethora of painful near death experiences. Disney's interpretation be damned, there is some freedom of choice after all.
You go Simone.