Aryan Khan is everyone's child

It is intoxicating to have a mini-me who resembles your grandfather and behaves ditto like a long-ago aunt, but children are also their own person who will be able to trace all their flaws back to you and only you.

If you delete the verbose joy a common man feels at the slightest scandal that can hit the biggest stars, the latest news headline of SRK's son being in judicial custody only taps into the vast parental guilt that exists in an enormous quantity in all of us at all times.

Can any parent claim unalloyed joy at their offspring's arrival into the world with a straight face? Yes, it is heady, intoxicating to have a mini-me who resembles your grandfather and behaves ditto like a long-ago aunt, but children are also their own person who will be able to trace all their flaws back to you and only you. Anything that goes wrong in their life is your fault – this is why fathers and mothers beam and brag about high marks and other small sundry achievements when they can, alert to predictable brickbats from the brats themselves. This is a genetic cycle – we blame those who came before us, and those who come after us blame us.

If it is not an inherited illness or misshapen nose, it is an addiction to this drink or that cigarette. We see not only our so-called talents in them, we also sense the darkness, the succumbing to a bleakness we hitherto only thought we were haunted by. Look what we passed on, we mourn privately. While we were busy coping in our adult years, there they were, the little ones, open-mouthed, doing as we did and not as we said. Privy to our honest and raw moments, they cannot come out unscathed by what we went through.

We do want to give our kids the best of everything, we want them to have what we did not have... In our eagerness to please, perhaps we harm. This thought does cross our minds now and then, especially as they themselves articulate this often. Whatever we do, we are wrong.

A writer once confessed to me that he blames himself for all of his daughter's present-day problems – it is psychological, he fears, 'because I left her mother when she was very young.' Implied is the inherent self-accusatory sentiment. How vulnerable can a father or mother be before his/her child without the latter at some point using it against the former?

Parents tend to take the fall. And in this spectacular tabloid sensation that Aryan Khan is turning out to be – ensuring journalists won't run out of stories in the foreseeable future – we the readers seek a kind of acquittal. What is that we shouldn't do.

A baby born in a not very dysfunctional family has all the adults around him identify with him as also see him as future hope, all the while aware that this is an imposition. The taunts and memes in the current case intensify that creepy feeling of how much we burden the next generation with our own desperate expectations.

Aryan's wide-eyed selfie in a brush with a brutal world is every parent’s worst nightmare. Once the gossip quotient settles down, the protective instinct kicks in.