Where Has the Golden Childhood Gone1

My first b o m is now an over ambitious twenty-four-year-old-professional for whom the sky is the limit. Second son is a narcissistic mirror-gazing twenty one roaming amidst a galaxy of like-minded friends. My daughter is a sparkling, bubbling young lady of "sixteen going on seventeen". All three of them have provided me with more than enough material for being involved in this nerve-wrecking-soul-searching exercise of selecting the topic for my Indian Psychiatric Society's presidential speech of 1990. Also their activities, their feelings their despair and aspirations have prompted me to this little investigative work to search for the unknown destination where the Myth the Golden Childhood has gone. For this I am thoroughly indebted to them. Dear friends between you and me, my husband Lion Dr. S. C. Dut ta who was a renowned footballer of yester year and the founder professor of the department of Urology at Guwahati Medical College and myself have no hesitation to confess that writing about the children is as tough a job as bearing, rearing and parenting them. So kindly bear with me if my thoughts occasionally " R U N A M O K " and sound a bit "incoherent" like our beloved patients. As very rightly said by famous poet Ogden Nash. Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, And that's what parents are created for.