On a surfboard of confidence

GEETA PADMANABHAN

AH, to be a teenager today! To be the darling of the earth's eyes and the focus of the world's business! To be the privileged species that can make a difference in this world'!

Look around. Music channels serenade their virtuosity and magazines and newspaper pull-outs espouse their cause. Clothes and consumer products provide exclusively for teenage tastes and food joints cater to their fast-paced life-style. Vehicles that only a teenager can drive with speed and ease wait for his patronage. Bookstores ladle out Chicken Soup specially for the teenage soul. National bestseller lists include books on teenage issues.

Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Charlotte Church are teenage icons who bask in unbridled peer adulation. Their concert promoters pay them sums unheard of a generation ago. Macaulay Culkins (of Home Alone fame) is a teenager contemplating divorce after two years of marriage.

The epitome of a teenager doing his own thing is Britian's Prince William - hunted by paparazzi whether he is attending church in England or roughing it in a camp outside Santiago. There he cooks, chops wood and cleans toilets (without gloves!) all of which is faithfully recorded by cameras.

On television you now get to watch both sitcoms and serials woven around adolescent lives. Workshops meant 'only for teenagers' counsel them on how to achieve more, list the pressures and pains they have to face and give advice on how to cope with them.

You see teens as confident cat-walkers, poised winners of beauty contests and inevitably as actors and actresses in films.

College students hold festivals and conduct quiz programmes that would win appreciative nods from Siddhartha Basu and Derek O'Brien. Read this report about a college cultural event. "All the students are teenagers but the poise and confidence with which they conducted the different events was remarkable. Several Raheja students... have done summer jobs in... Hyundai, Daewoo, Times Bank and Tata Press. Every student of the organising committee has an e-mail address as the well designed invite shows".

Open your newspaper to the section that brings employers and job seekers together. You would think that the country now leans on young shoulders to carry on its trade and commerce. There is a nationwide hiring of teenagers for jobs that ask for a creative bent of mind, knowledge of computers, communication skills and command over the English language.

And then there are the teen entrepreneurs. Silicon Valley newspapers routinely report the exploits of young people who have competed and emerged successful in the adult world of business.

Indian teenyboppers match their international counterparts byte for byte. Vinayak Nagaraj, an undergraduate student of Economics (his choice) at Loyola set up a web-hosting service with BBS when he was only thirteen! He offers consultancy services besides e- mail facilities and chat rooms and runs the show alone on the Indian side.

Indian boys and girls, as we can see, are reinventing themselves. They have never been as mobile as they are today. Many speak with pride about summer jobs as shop assistants, computer facilitators, door-to-door salespersons and customer-care givers. They have rooms (spaces!), computers, mobikes, agendas and minds of their own.

Go through information on Olympics participants. Twenty (it used to be thirty) now looks too old for sprinting, diving, jumping, vaulting, balancing or doing the floor exercises in international competitions. Tennis has its teenage sensations, chess has young champions. Soon the organisers may be forced to impose a minimum age for those participating in competitive sports. We don't want to see a kid dumping his lollipop before walking into the court with racquet in hand or jumping up to dangle from the Roman rings!

One area where their presence really pleases me is writing reviews for books. Access Amazon.com and browse through the reviews of Harry Potter books. Critiques written by teenagers share pages that carry the opinions of established writers. Newspapers all over the world run separate columns for publishing the views of teenagers.

On the flip side (sigh! There is always a flip side) police reports tell us that increasingly youngsters are involved in crimes that used to be the preserve of much older people. They burgle homes, kill helpless elderly residents, carry weapons to school and gun down their classmates. The Information Age helps them construct bombs with the ease of tossing up a salad and handle drugs with a sophistication that would be the envy of any medical student swotting for his degree. One gets to hear of teenage pregnancies. And of burn-outs of promising talents.

How did the in-between-ager emerge as a powerful attention getter? Isn't it ironical that while one of the greatest achievements of the last century is the increase in life expectancy the decision-making age is being lowered all the time? Why do we expect our teenage boys and girls to push themselves faster, higher and further? Why do we want them to study, drive, vote, earn, excel in sports, look good and get acquainted with the fine arts? (Please note I have not included 'be with the family' here. Which teenager has time for that?) Why do they have to be 'highly effective'? Why do they need to put themselves into punishing regimens that will give them the shape and stamina to create world records constantly? What makes us think that the teenager has to be an achiever or at least show qualities that will put him on the victory stand? Why was Rahul Narayan on stage for a concert when he was ill-prepared to face a critical audience?

One reason, no doubt is the competition. In a do-it-or-be-done-in set up anyone who starts early has a definite advantage. When employers place advertisements for techies fluent in most computer languages, have packed in a few years' experience and are in the age group of 18-25, you better start working before you shed your puppy fat, my dear.

Then there are the opportunities mobbing every teen door - opportunities for both productive and disruptive output. With more freedom (of movement more than anything else) and money at his disposal today's teenager thirsts for challenges beyond the classroom. Social norms no longer stand in the way of his trying his talent in any field. Academic excellence is not the sole means that will take him places. Huge waves beckon him tantalisingly and all he needs is a surfboard of confidence to ride them.

Computers are another contributing factor. With their finger- friendly format and game-like plan they have succeeded in putting the teenager ahead of the gray-haired wisdom of the previous generation. In a classic role-reversal it is the older generation that bows to the mouse-wielding X-generationer. Respect is now a two-way channel.

So instead of asking him to slow down, we give him tips on time management. Instead of telling him to take it easy and planning family trips, we pay to accommodate all his activities. Instead of giving him/ her time to sit around and dream, we give them work schedules. We don't tell him that scoring, winning and earning credits are not the ends of the universe. Not being the brightest child on the block is not life threatening. He is not under a primordial curse to prove himself. Instead we tell him that dizzying competition, both in and outside school, is inevitable. "Just look around you, baby!"

I notice a lot of grey and thinning hair among teenagers today.

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