Bangalore: “When I was small, I thought you were simply great. And when I grew up, I knew I was always right as a puppy!” says a dalmation looking up at its dad. This was on a card a teenager finally bought for Father’s Day. He is one of the many sons who belong to the new creed that does not say ‘I don’t need a special day to honour my dad’.

The Western trend has surely caught up with Namma Bengaluru. While sending flowers and cakes home is the trend among outstation sons and daughters, the ones at home prefer to go out for a dinner and surprise their father with gifts. Online booking centres and gift shops in the city have witnessed heightened activity the past couple of days.

“We get orders from abroad and other Indian states. Usually the price range of gifts we sell is from Rs 500 to Rs 800,” said Ravi Tiwari of Orchidsnroses. They have special Fathers’ Day kits, comprising laptops as well as gulab jamuns. Customized packages are also available.

BANGALORE: The Children's Rights Initiative for Shared Parenting (CRISP) called for law reforms to ensure a balanced participation of both parents in a child's life in the event of their separation. "We demand at least 50% of custody be given to parents," said Kumar V Jahgirdar, president, CRISP.

He said research has proved that fatherless children are prone to towards suicidal tendencies, drug addiction and teenage pregnancies, and are likely to elope or drop out from school. Deprivation of fatherly love and affection can even lead to serious disorders like Parental Alienation Syndrome.

The organization asked to set up courts to deal with child custody cases. "Our law favours women. But a child should get affection from both the parents," said Samuel Perera, medical counsellor, CRISP.

The organization is conducting a rally on Saturday to demand family law reforms.

Punish Persons who misuse IPC 498A and Domestic Violence Law: NGO

Child Rights Initiative for Shared Parenting (CRISP), a Bangalore based first of its kind all India body (NGO) dealing with parents fighting for children's custody disputes ongoing/over divorce battle today urged Government of India and all the concerned state governments to amend/make fresh laws to grant equal access to both parents who have been fighting for custody of their child/children. Further they appealed to make shared parenting mandatory. Requested Law Ministry to set up special courts to deal with Child Custody cases in order to speedily dispose the cases. In any eventuality, the matters must be deposed within three months of filing the case, the members of CRISP observed. They also demanded to punish persons who misuse IPC 498A and Domestic Violence Law.

CRISP has over 1000 active members across India and abroad. It has chapters all over India. Addressing a press conference in Hyderabad today Mr. Kumar V. Jahgirdar, Founder and President of CRISP who himself is fighting a legal battle for equal access to his daughter from his wife Chethana (currently married to Indian leg spinner Anil Kumble) along with some members said misuse of anti-dowry laws and other woman-protection laws has now become a well recognized problem in India. Increasing number of aged parents, sisters and children in the husband's family are falsely accused and arrested under these inhumane laws, and find them defenseless against the harassment unleashed thereafter and multiple litigations for the same offence/allegations with violations of Article 20 and 21 of Indian constitution.

Adding further he stated that annually about 75,000 dowry harassment cases are filed across India. Approximately 1,20,000 women (related to husbands) were arrested in the 4 years (2004 to 2007) under the dowry laws. As per the National Crime Records Bureau data, more than 80% people arrested under dowry law cases have turned out to be innocent. (For example: In the year 2006, a total number of 1,37,180 persons were arrested under 498A and out of those 4,812 were not even charge sheeted. Out of the 62,746 persons who were charge sheeted - 50,895 i.e. approximately 81% were found innocent after the completion of the trial and the rest are still under trial). Every year 52,000 married men commit suicide in India as against 28,000 married women (Source: 2005 - NCR). Every year more than 1,00,000 men lose their job and become unemployed because of wrongful arrests under the dowry laws. World Health Organisation report on Elder Abuse finds misuse of dowry laws by the daughters-in-law as the main reason for the elder abuse in India. The Supreme Court of India has already termed the dowry law misuse as "Legal Terrorism". BBC study indicates that more than 80% women under-trials (related to husbands) lodged in Tihar jail (Delhi) are booked under dowry related laws.

CRISP demands Government, Home Ministry, Chief Justice of India to act on its demand of granting equal rights to both the parents who have been fighting for the custody of the child. In many cases despite of the court orders, Fathers are not allowed to see children. Children should have equal access to both the parents in order to help the child lead a normal life. We must make shared parenting mandatory. Approximately Five Lakh parents especially fathers are suffering with this kind of cases where they don't have access to their children. The mothers, in order to take revenge on the husband don't allow fathers to see the child. They have been violating many court orders. The poor fathers can't do anything. They have been suffering in silence. Now the time has come. Government must understand the pain of the father. It is not that just mothers alone have love and affection for the child. The fathers too have equal feelings towards their offspring. It is unfortunate that the laws are gender biased more towards women. According the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "All are equal before the law, and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law". Hence, men should also be accorded protection from physical, verbal, emotional, sexual and financial abuse by women.

Gender Biased LAW should immediately be made crime based instead of any assumption that all women never lie and all the men are born as Criminals. "MEN/WOMEN" word to be replaced by word "PERSON" and word "wife/husband" to be replaced with the word "SPOUSE".

CRISP believes in the concept of shared parenting i.e., wherein the child should have access to its natural parents, the father and the mother in the best interest of the child when both the parents are otherwise not disqualified. We take pride in the fact that National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), a Government of India undertaking recently has appreciated our initiative on child welfare and significance of love and care of both the parents in a child's life.

In our society unfortunately 2 out of 5 marriages are ending up in divorce more so in the Metros and the educated classes of the society, especially the upper middle class and affluent class. CRISP receives various complaints in matters related to parental alienation including that of NRI's pertaining to parental abduction of children. We are presenting to our media friends a typical case of an unfortunate father Dr. V. Ravi Chandran, a world renowned scientist who is deprived of the care and custody of his son Master Aditya aged about 6 years, from more than 670 days. Please also refer www.rescueaditya.org for further details. For more than 21 months the father doesn't even know the whereabouts and the welfare of the child and obviously this great scientist and wonderful father is in a lot of distress due to the uncertainty of his loving child.

Dr. V. Ravi Chandran is Ph.D. & M.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Florida. He has got the world patent for several important medicines... Liquid formulations of metformin, US patents 6890957, 6559187, Novel compounds with High Therapeutic Index, US & worldwide patents pending in USA, CANADA etc., and various others, to name a few. He is also the recipient of 2004 distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Florida in May 2004 for his lifetime contribution to Pharmaceutical Sciences. He has also performed as a consultant to Medical staff at Harvard Medical School.

His wife Vijayasree Voora had meticulously planned for illegal kidnapping of Aditya. She moved Aditya from place to place to avoid tracing. Past 21 months she subjected to Aditya to live in substandard motels which she changed often. She did not admit him to any school for a period of more than 21 months preventing him from having social contacts, schooling, or any stability in his life. All Aditya knows is cruelty from his mother. She had deprived Aditya of love and attention from his father, and also from all members of family from either side. Aditya was treated to mediocre schooling or no schooling, despicable apartment life, nomadic existence, and being moved all over India with his fugitive mother. Vijayasree Voora, with her reckless behavior due to severe mental illness is endangering the welfare of a child, with contempt of court orders, continues to abuse Aditya by holding him hostage. Recently Aditya was found to be suffering from bronchitis and typhoid due to the fugitive lifestyle he was subjected to.

The press conference was addressed by many members of the CRISP. To put pressure on the government for their rights, CRISP is planning to have roadshow across India, to mobilise public opinion on the same. It also urged media to highlight their righful request.

The whereabouts of Master Aditya can be informed to his father and his natural guardian Dr. V. Ravi Chandran on his mobile: 9704362000.

The parents suffering with similar problems may reach CRISP (Flat No. 3, Natasha Penta, Infantry Road Cross, Bangalore - 560001. Tel: 080 - 25593848, Fax: 080-41238847 www.crisp-india.org) to fight for the common cause to save our children to lead normal life

With two out of five marriages ending in divorce in the country mostly in cities and towns, the Child Rights Initiative for Shared Parenting (CRISP), first of its kind Non-Governmental Organisation, has taken up the cause of men who were denied access to their children.

Higlighting the plight of over five lakh such parents, especially fathers, CRISP Founder President Kumar V Jahgirdhar told reporters here today that ''in many cases despite court orders, fathers are not allowed to see their children. Children should have equal access to both parents for them to lead a normal life. We must make shared parenting mandatory''.

Mr Kumar, himself was fighting a legal battle for equal access to his daughter from his wife Chethana, who has now married to Indian Cricket legspinner Anil Kumble.

He pressed for setting up of special courts for disposal of child custody cases in a maximum of three months and enactment of laws to make shared parenting mandatory.

Noting that misuse of anti-dowry laws and other woman-protection laws were a serious problem in the country, he said increasing number of aged parents, sisters and children in husband's family were implicated in ''false cases''.

''The mothers in order to take revenge on their husbands, don't allow them to see the child. Courts and Governments should understand that fathers too have love and affection for their children,'' he contended.

CRISP presented the case of a Non-Resident Indian pharmaceutical scientist V Ravichandran in Florida who has been denied access to his six-year-old son Aditya for over 670 days with his mother moving their son from one place to another.

The CRISP would hold roadshows all over the country to mobilise public opnion on the plight of fathers, he added

It takes a village to raise a child.

African saying

A chilling figure reached us late last year: 5,871 children committed suicide either upon receiving unsatisfactory academic results or even more pathetically, in anticipation of them, which means their emotional state was so fragile that they couldn& #8217;t bear the thought of either disappointing their parents or working out an alternative plan to the goal that had already been fixed for them. Anything below a certain magic percentage which is the key to a course in higher education and a 16-year-old thinks he is a failure.

In none of these cases did anyone expect these children to equate their lives with their marks. Yet, for at least 10 years that is what they had been led to believe… that they were worth only what they won in a classroom. Nothing about their all-round personalities mattered, whether they were thoughtful children, respectful to elders or compassionate to household staff/ trades people. It meant little or nothing at all how talented they might have been at music, gardening, sketching, fixing things about the house or cooking. Hardly anyone noticed or appreciated those aspects of their unfolding characters. What mattered was only whether they were scoring machines in schoolroom tests or on the playing fields. As these are the reported deaths, we can be sure there were many more. And as for those who did not take their lives, we may be equally sure that most of them live with feelings of defeat, depression and injury: an inflammatory mix.

Who is responsible? A system of intense competition that makes unnatural demands, robs a child of her free time, and is supported by a collaboration of social and familial expectations which together form a human trap.

Now, is there something we don’t know or are we carrying on regardless? For at least a 100 years since psychoanalysis proved it, we have known that an emotionally happy child will grow into a stable adult .Yet how, in the space of just two decades, has the attitude to raising children, and goal-setting for them changed to one of joyless and extreme urgency? Nearly every tender and imaginative space in a child’s life has been invaded and adult anxieties concerning performance bluntly passed on to seven and eight-year-old humans who have not yet grasped the concepts of wealth and success, but can sense their power.

In the current pattern of rearing the next generation is hidden the kind of pain that I equate with what I saw on Khader Nawaz Khan Road (Chennai) some time ago: a calf no more than a week old was being driven with a stick to keep up with its anxious, mooing mother who was tied to a moped doing a brisk 10 kmph. The sheer bewilderment and panic in the young creature’s eyes as it wobbled along is reflected in the eyes of our youngsters goaded to get through tests and tricks devised by an adult vision of discipline and attainments deemed right for a child of three in LKG; for a child of four in UKG; for a child of five in class I. This is so the world over. An article in Time magazine (May 2008) described the joy of parents who send their children to learning centres at the age of two. “She can recognise numbers and pictures!” And this at an age when the child is powerless to choose for herself.

What about some time to stand and stare? Not on your sweet life.

On the one hand we recognise and celebrate individuality. On the other, a crowd of four-year-olds is expected to learn to read, write and recite at exactly the same pace, triggering early and sharp competition in the schoolroom. Socialising, and learning to give and live together is considered far less important and in not counselling children that the most vital thing in life is human relationships, we are doing them the injustice of opening the door to loneliness.

Why will they — these tense, weary children — not grow up into impatient and angry young people if we do not spend enough time with them in their early years? We not only send them out of the safety of the house as soon as we can, but talk about it constantly in their presence as if our goal is to put some distance between them and us. “Come June, she will go off for three hours every day giving me some time for myself!” is something that we hear all the time.

Have we outsourced parenting to schools?

The most valuable thing we can give our children is our time and the continuous confidence of parental presence as they grow at their pace, and from their own inner visions. For, in every child the inner vision of life is brighter than the outer which is dictated by a world which imposes “learning” from the outside. All systems of modern education insist that the world must be understood in certain patterns: mathematically, historically, scientifically. Learning which could be delayed till the infant personality stabilises is applied too rapidly, suppressing the inner vision.

If we push our children away from ourselves and into the world too early in their lives and tell them to overcome everybody else, what kind of emotional equipment will they grow up with? We would do well to remember what Sylvia Ashton-Werner said about orienting children: “War and peace wait in an infant room, wait and vie.”