Some time back, I read about a father who got so angry over the poor performance of his 12-year-old daughter in her class VII examination that he ordered her to beg in front of a well-known temple, donning her school uniform, as punishment.

He not only cursed her but brought out a worn-out aluminium bowl and shoved it in her palm. (In India, an old, dented bowl made of this cheap metal is associated with beggars). The girl was a pupil of a reputable school that could be easily identified from her graceful uniform. The father’s command that she wear it while begging was to ensure her total humiliation. The girl sobbed incessantly while sitting with the bowl in front of the temple. Beggars, who were there on their daily errand, were taken aback to see a well-dressed addition to their tribe. And the devout coming to the temple were no less amazed to see a little girl in her school uniform, begging. Her muffled cries surprised all and kept them guessing and whispering about the possible compulsions behind the girl’s plight. Some felt she must have been in deep trouble. Others took pity on her but moved on. Nobody cared to talk to her to look deeper into the strange phenomenon.

Fortunately for her, one of the curious onlookers, a worker with an NGO, took the girl aside, heard her tale and then took her to a police station, where her father later admitted to having forced his daughter into begging in her school uniform. However, he had a strange excuse — he said he did it only to teach her how to face adversities in life. This quickly cooked-up argument did not cut any ice. So he was arrested, but granted bail shortly thereafter. The man then threw up another absurd assertion, claiming that his daughter’s poor showing at the examination had caused him social humiliation and “spoilt the family’s reputation”. And now that she had gone begging, he would not accept her back in the family.

This attitude came as a shock to those who heard him. It earned the man his neighbours’ ire and some of them damaged his car. In view of the situation, the girl was put in a juvenile home for some time till her father came to his senses.

This was not an isolated incident because disciplining an errant child is a common feature in every family. But, in this case, it differed only in the sense that the punishment the father chose for his daughter was unthinkable, barbaric and degrading.

When we were young, most of us must have received punishment from our parents and teachers for having committed some kind of a misdeed, mischief or mistake.

However, these were all intended to discipline us and make us good human beings.

I also had my share.

Quite often, I was ‘sentenced’ by a particular teacher to stand behind a large-sized moveable wooden blackboard with my back towards the wall. Happily, the board enabled me to hide my face. But I always found it hard to kill that gruelling time I had to spent ‘till the rising of the class’. Minutes looked like hours. Anticipating more of such punishment in that particular period, I used to pocket a couple of chalksticks. That solved my problem. While the teacher lectured, I spent time quietly doodling or drawing sketches — my favourite pastime — on the reverse side of the board, unnoticed.

Going back to the angry father of the 12-year-old girl, it can be said that he surely belonged to an entirely different class of parents. The mode of punishment he decided upon points to some aberration in his thinking. Perhaps, he needed to be disciplined himself. Many parents fail to appreciate the fact that even a child has a high sense of self-respect and does not like to be humiliated in front of strangers.

When things go beyond a limit, a much-harried adolescent revolts against the family, often using aggression as a tool to retaliate. ‘Spare the rod’ is the slogan of the modern age. In many countries, corporal punishments like spanking or even slapping a child have become a thing of the past.

I wish we don’t hear again about any parent humiliating his or her child, or for that matter any other child, the way this seventh-standard girl was.

Lalit Raizada is a journalist based in India.