Letters to the Editor: Social media addiction

During the pandemic, in-person teaching-learning remained difficult. As a result, there had been an increasing move towards children's daily overuse of social media. When a significant amount of time is spent on social networks, parents and children experience less face-to-face interaction and consequently, they miss out on an important opportunity for connection. The growth of social media addiction does have a potentially damaging impact on the strong bond between a parent and a child. Such an addiction is likely to break down family communication. It, no doubt, dilutes family relationships. It hardly needs to a mentioned that when a parent is unable to engage with the child, ruptures in the relationship between them may occur.

It's understandable that due to inadequacy of time and the piling workloads, parents often have recourse to gadgets to engage their children. Also, it is, undeniably, not ideal to take children completely off social networks. As such, parents need to identify first what their child is inclined towards and use them as alternatives to screen time. It will be easier now as classroom learning has been resumed. This, I feel, can help nullify the impact that screen time has on children and hence can surely help strengthen the family bond.

Dipen Gogoi,

Teok Jorhat

Eye-opener court decisions

The Bombay High Court converted the death-to-life imprisonment without parole and Furlough and observed that they deserve 'imprisonment for life' to repent for the offence committed by three convicts in the gangrape of a 22-year-old photojournalist inside the defunct Shakti Mills compound in Central Mumbai in 2013. Terming rape as a "serious blow to the supreme honour and dignity of a woman" the court said that the convicts "do not deserve to assimilate with the society as it would be difficult to survive in a society of such men who look upon women with derision, depravity, contempt and objects of desire." The court further quoted "A sentence of death is irrevocable and therefore the basic principle in sentencing policy would be life imprisonment as a rule and death penalty as an exception and in this case". The accused do not deserve any leniency, empathy or sympathy. Every day the rising sun would remind them of the barbaric àcts committed by them and the night would lay them with a heavy heart filled with guilt and remorse. And by ruling out remissions and parole the court does not want them to end life outside the jail environment and come to think about it, it is a worse punishment than the death penalty.

In another case, a man who raped a minor girl in 2013; was given the death penalty. He did not deserve to live as he had shown no mercy to the child when he used her to satisfy his lust. The question that shook the judges, as indeed anyone who knew about the case, was how the fellow ravaged an innocent who was playing in London. That he was the father of two girls and a boy made his crime graver and rarest of rare, deserving no mercy.

The two judgements are welcome as they underscore the point that certainty of punishment, rather than the severity of punishment, is a greater deterrent for the criminals. Justice has been tempered with mercy and severity in these cases.

Yash Pal Ralhan,

Jalandar 144003