Hurry Up!
And some lessons pertaining to speed
Ma! Hurry Up!! by Rukmini Banerji, illustrated by Sheetal Thapa and translated by Madhav Chavan
This story has a small and definite point. And that point is that parents of young children are always doing something for valid reasons. Not that the little boy in this story would accept that thought, at least initially. His mother is always doing something. He wants to get up, to get on, to go off to the races. But she is always doing something.
When the little boy wakes up, she tells him to wash his face. She is feeding the family at that time, getting another child ready for school, doing all manner else.
But hurry up! her son tells her. When she is washing something or making something or preparing something. Hurry up! the boy says. He’s so frustrated he could cry.
He’s late for his breakfast; he’s late for school. Other children have been fed and dispatched off to face the day before him. Hurry up! That’s his incessant, constant complaint. Don’t mind about turning the lights off, or demanding that the children get washed. Hurry up!
And then finally, when his mother takes him by the hand and starts to walk the little boy to school, he is mollified. He has her attention. They are on the move. There’s no need, any longer, for anyone to hurry up. We can relax and all is well.
What does this tell us about children? That they are impatient sometimes, heedless of others’ demands, quite uninhibited when they want to make the contents of their minds known. That they can grow tremendously frustrated when they are not the focus of attention. That they have a strong — and strongly biased — sense of unfairness, and they don’t like any unfairness that seems to disadvantage them in particular. All of this is somewhat obvious.
I’m sure you’ve all seen the video of the two monkeys and the experiment in which they were ‘paid unfairly’ for performing a task. One monkey is paid in grapes, wonderful grapes. While the other monkey is paid less handsomely, less often. What happens to the monkey? In short, he loses it. He throws the meagre payment that he’s given at the experimenter in their white coat. He clutches at the bars of his enclosure and screams and screams. Screams and screams until he’s sick.
That’s all of us, of course. We’re all like that poor monkey. We don’t like unfairness. And we don’t like to be kept waiting either. To be delayed by the actions of others. Justly or unjustly, the unpunctuality of others is always a problem. At least emotionally. Most people, by the time they’re adults, grow out of actually stamping their feet and crying. But some may still want to even later in life, hiding the impulse below an impassive face and even a smile.
Impatience is one of those things. In the world of adults, the impatient are either members of the boss class — to whom people have to do at least a little bit of bowing and scraping and saying, we’ll look into it right away, honest — or they are ordinary people or passive observers. For the latter group, their sense that things should be faster is met with sneering condescension or contempt from the powers that be.
Don’t want to die on an NHS waiting list? Don’t be a baby. That’s how the world always worked, will always work. It’s how things are meant to be.
Didn’t you know, some sub-human bureaucrat sometimes says, that you can either do things well or fast or cheaply? At most two of those things. Didn’t you know that? And then the same person will, if prompted, go into a long explanation of why thinking, for example, that it shouldn’t take a third of a human lifetime to build a road is actually naive and stupid — and you’re wrong and foolish for thinking anything different.
The intended lesson of this book for children is that adults may be slow, but they have good reason for it. That may be so in the household. Lots of things to do — only two, at max, people to do many of them. Fair enough. I don’t dispute it.
But socially — on a wider, broader scale — telling people or institutions to hurry up is often good. I live in Britain, where there’s no point attempting to build or invest in anything because you will be stopped, by legal threats and by the police if necessary, or by crippling, agonising inertia otherwise. Where there’s no point trying to build or invest in anything, because you’ll be retired or dead by the time you’re allowed to do anything with your life.
But of course, it does not need to be like that. It does not need to be like that at all.
Not all of our problems would be solved by allowing people to build things in the ordinary course of their short lives — something not possible now.
The really hard problems of existence may yet go unsolved. But it’s worth a go to speed things up regardless. I think so, at any rate.
So let’s thank the impatient children of the world — be they toddlers or little ones a little older, or people in their advanced, decrepit years like me. For one thing at least. Sometimes it is good to go fast, and sometimes the best thing you can do for someone supposedly with power and authority (someone who is meant to know best) is to tell them to hurry up — to hurry up right now.