Harpreet Chhachhia

What Animals Teach Our Children

Published on February 17, 2026 by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

This evening, while walking in the compound with a few members of the building, I found myself in a conversation that stayed with me long after it ended.

One of the ladies asked about a puppy I had rescued — Drizzle. I told her I had fostered the sweet fellow and then found him a good home. Another mother, who had just joined us who had a young son — a boy of eleven or twelve who adores dogs and kittens — quickly said, half-laughing, “Oh, don’t tell my son that. He’ll want one. And I don’t want that happening.”

I understood what she might have meant. Often, when children ask for pets, the adults become the primary caretakers. Feeding schedules, vet visits, cleaning up, supervision — it is work. Real work. And not everyone is prepared for it.

But as she spoke, my mind wandered elsewhere.

In our very own building, there is a dog reared by two boys who were then in the eighth and ninth standards. They were young, still children themselves. Today, years later, those boys are in college. The dog is fully grown. And they have cared for him beautifully. Consistently. Tenderly. Responsibly.

It made me think about what animals actually do for children.

Animals Teach the Value of Life

The first lesson is simple and profound: life matters.

When a child feeds a dog, refills a water bowl, or sits quietly with a frightened kitten, they begin to understand that another being’s survival can depend on them. Responsibility stops being abstract. It becomes embodied.

They learn that hunger is real. That thirst is real. That comfort is real.

And that their actions — or inactions — have consequences.

Animals Teach Empathy Without Language

Children are not taught empathy through lectures. They learn it through experience.

A limping dog.

A frightened cat hiding under the bed.

A pet recovering from surgery.

In these moments, children begin to understand pain — not intellectually, but emotionally. They see vulnerability. They witness fragility. They learn how to sit beside suffering without turning away.

No textbook can offer that.

Animals invite children to feel.

What Animals Teach Our Children

Human relationships are layered with expectation, negotiation, ego, reciprocity. We love — but often with conditions attached.

Animals are different.

They ask for food, water, shelter, companionship. In return, they offer loyalty, presence, joy — abundantly. Freely.

For a child, this is transformative.

They experience giving without bargaining. They experience receiving without performance. They learn that love is not always a transaction.

And perhaps, somewhere quietly, that reshapes the way they grow into adults.

Learning About Loss

There is another lesson that is harder to speak about, but equally important.

Animals introduce children to the finality of life.

If a pet falls ill or passes away, a child encounters loss in a contained, intimate space. They may not articulate philosophical ideas about mortality, but they feel it. The absence. The ache. The silence.

They learn that life is ephemeral. That presence is precious. That time is not guaranteed.

This awareness — however painful — deepens them.

It teaches them to value the present.

Becoming a Citizen of the World

When a child loves an animal, something expands inside them.

They begin to understand that the world is not built solely for human beings. That other creatures share space, air, vulnerability.

It dismantles the illusion that we stand at the top of some moral pyramid.

It softens the ego.

A child who grows up caring for an animal often grows up more aware — of suffering, of environmental impact, of kindness beyond their own species. They become, in the truest sense, a citizen of the world.

The Tragedy of Suppressed Kindness

I do not dismiss the practical challenges of having a pet. They are real. Time, money, commitment — these are not small matters.

But I wonder if sometimes, in protecting ourselves from inconvenience, we also protect ourselves from growth.

If a child shows kindness — genuine, unprompted kindness — towards another living being, is it not something to nurture rather than silence?

In a world that feels increasingly cruel, hurried and indifferent, the impulse to care is sacred.

When a child says, “I want to love this being,” they are revealing the softest and strongest part of themselves.

To deny that entirely — without even exploring the possibility — feels like a small tragedy.

Because animals do not only enter our homes.

They enter our conscience.

And sometimes, they help raise better humans than we ever could alone.

Wuthering Heights

Published on February 17, 2026February 17, 2026 by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

There is a difference between intensity and depth. The 2026 adaptation of Wuthering Heights mistakes one for the other — and in doing so, does not merely reinterpret Emily Brontë but systematically simplifies her.

Directed by Emerald Fennell, with a screenplay adapted by Fennell herself, the film presents itself as daring and contemporary. What it delivers instead is a narrowing: a deliberate exchange of metaphysical passion for corporeal spectacle.

As someone who reveres Brontë’s novel, I left the cinema not stirred, not haunted, but cheated.

Brontë’s book is architecturally complex. Its nested narration — principally through Nelly Dean — creates moral distance, ambiguity, and irony. In the film, Nelly (played with gravitas, though undermined by the script) is reframed as a near-villain, a manipulator rather than the morally ambiguous mediator of class and conscience she is on the page. By collapsing her narrative function into something sinister, the adaptation dismantles the interpretive tension that gives the novel its sophistication.

Most unforgivable, however, is the complete removal of the second generation. Young Catherine, Hareton, and Linton are not decorative additions in Brontë’s structure; they are resolution. The novel is cyclical: violence breeds violence until tenderness interrupts inheritance. Hareton’s transformation from brutalised child to educated, loving man is the moral hinge of the text. By excising this arc, the film amputates redemption. What remains is unrelieved obsession — two destructive figures locked in themselves.

Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw is rendered impulsive and overtly sexualised, rather than the fiercely divided woman torn between class ambition and metaphysical attachment. Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff broods handsomely, but without the volcanic stillness and inherited trauma that define him in the novel. Hindley Earnshaw’s absence strips Heathcliff’s vengeance of context; rage becomes aesthetic rather than psychological.

The treatment of Catherine’s motherhood further distorts the novel’s design. In Brontë, her daughter survives; renewal is possible. The film’s decision to have Catherine lose her child pushes the narrative into gratuitous nihilism, dismantling the brutal yet balanced symmetry of destruction and repair.

The sexual explicitness is perhaps the most glaring misreading. In the novel, Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is metaphysical — “I am Heathcliff.” It is identity, not carnality. Their relationship is defined by repression and spiritual fusion. Here, consummation is foregrounded. Erotic tableaux — including a baffling BDSM-tinged encounter involving Joseph — substitute shock for depth. The aesthetic often feels indebted to decadent modern erotica rather than nineteenth-century Gothic intensity. In Brontë, desire is powerful because it is contained. Here it is displayed — and diminished.

Isabella Linton’s portrayal compounds the confusion. In the novel, her suffering is delusion turned horror — romantic fantasy collapsing into brutality. In the film, her torment at Heathcliff’s hands is stylised to the point of ambiguity, unsettling not because it is violent, but because it seems unmoored from moral critique.

Visually, the insistent palette of blacks, whites, and aggressive reds proclaims symbolism rather than allowing it to accumulate organically. The moors in Brontë breathe; they are psychic landscapes. Here they feel curated — aesthetic rather than elemental. Stylisation is not inherently flawed, but when style replaces psychological layering, the result is aesthetic noise.

Only fleetingly — in the childhood confession of love, Catherine smiling as Heathcliff sleeps — does the adaptation approach Brontë’s emotional truth. In that moment, innocence and inevitability coexist. It reminds us of the tragedy’s origin. And of what has been lost.

This is not an interpretation; it is a truncation.

By removing the second generation, altering Catherine’s fate, villainising Nelly, erasing Hindley, and substituting erotic spectacle for metaphysical passion, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation loses more than half the novel’s complexity.

Brontë wrote about obsession, inheritance, cruelty, repression, and the fragile possibility of grace.

This film offers sex without structure, shock without substance — a Gothic symphony reduced to a single, discordant note.

It does not dare too much.

It understands too little.