Surviving Talent Hunts

The dime a dozen talent hunts and reality shows being conducted for kids are taking their toll.

The routine is standard. Your kid comes home from school with a form to fill and an event to go to. The perfunctory sheet of paper informs us that so and so is doing such and such to discover the hidden side of our precious kids (oooo, so nice of them). There are going to be x rounds of elimination, so could we please sign some ridiculous terms and conditions and turn up at 8 in the morning in that particular school in the back of beyond?

Of course, the kids want to go. Competitive spirit, or just too much watching of such shows on TV… the reason is immaterial. You sign away your time, money, privacy, (with no real clue what you’ll do in case your kids does qualify) Soon the kids run off into whatever it is that needs to be done.. till they get “eliminated”. Then the fun begins.

You have, assembled in one, usually uncomfortable space, anywhere from 50 to 200 edgy parents – all the ingredients needed for anxiety, bitching, comparing, duh, ego clashes, frustration, giggling, heart attacks, …everything upto Z.

Prominent groups include:
• Mothers and fathers trying to live up to the “perfect parent” image (If the Complan lady and the Raymonds man can do it, so can I!)
• Ladies anxious beyond description if their kids might somehow have become famished and undernourished in the last 30 minutes since they saw the kid,
• People bored out of their wits but unwilling to show it,
• Proud parents who will recount to reluctant neighbours detailed descriptions of their children’s talents
• Groups actively comparing the length of social studies answers and the unit test schedule in your kids school Vs my kids school
• The let’s-abuse-all-these-TV-Shows-while-we-sit-around-here group
• Group dedicated to making the organizers’ lives miserable
• People watchers (those that sit around and get their dose of entertainment by observing all the chaos happening). And there's the occasional nutcase who will open out her laptop and write blogs about it!

Eventually the event gets done. All the curry puffs are eaten, the tea-wallah packs up his shop, the abusing of judges is finished, the organizers begin to forget their own names and cuss the day they were born, and everyone heads home to see if some snippet of the day’s events made it to the local TV news bulletin … (Scrolling news update: shortfall of curry puffs has parents up in arms. Stay tuned for further developments…)

All is well with the world.