When was the last time our ‘Uncles’ and ‘Aunties’ and ‘Mummys’ and ‘Papas’ looked back at their own lives and found parallels with how the young react today?
At a recent party, I heard a Forty-something friend speak out against his children’s use of the word ‘Chill!’. He said, I quote, ‘I feel like giving them ek kaan ke neeche, when I hear them use the word’. The others at the party nodded in agreement, and didn’t take kindly to me when I pointed out that the same Forty+ friend was someone who had inspired me to include the word ‘Chu#$%@’ in my vocabulary, as since my early days, I heard him use the word at the drop off a hat.
Facebook and Twitter, or let’s say the entire social-networking spectrum has become a good and harmless way for the youth to blow off steam and indulge in all the irreverence they cannot show at home. But, now the ugly case of the two ‘Facebook Protesters’ Shaheen and Reenu, has shown us that sharing irreverent thoughts on Facebook is not as ‘harmless’ as one thought.
The authorities who I assume are people who have been ‘youthfully irreverent’ themselves at some point of their lives, could have defused a potentially volatile situation by gently reprimanding, instead of throwing the book at two young girls. Do the people in positions of power really understand how such a case acts upon the psyche of the young? Instead of holding their thoughts up high, everywhere in India, right now there are young people who are curbing themselves and censoring their thoughts so that they might fit in with the law. The message going out is that it is best to toe the line and keep one’s head down. It is a sad day when such a thing happens because everyone knows that progressive thoughts only arise when age-old attitudes are questioned. When the keepers of the law behave in such a cavalier fashion, they run the risk of stunting a generation, and the future of their own young.
I call upon all ‘Uncles’ and ‘Aunties’ to stop this 'Unclegiri' and bite into the forgotten fruit of youth and indulge in some good irreverent ‘Facebooking’ and blow off the repressed steam that is simmering inside all of them.
At best they would run the risk of a website crashing down, instead of the psyche of a nation’s youth.
