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The cats on the walk

The recent hoopla involving a teen at a pub leads MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER and RAKESH MEHAR to wonder what's going on with a particular class of our kids

PHOTO: P.V. SIVAKUMAR

TEEN TITANS? Youngsters should learn to live by the rules

The glitzy world of fashion usually contends with fashion police. However, occasionally gritty reality butts into this rarefied world, most often when drugs are involved. Self-styled fashion guru Prasad Bidapa had a taste of it when he cooled his heels for over a month in a Dubai prison last year when caught with some cannabis in his baggage. Last week, his 19-year-old son, who works for a garment exporter, had a brief taste of jail life in good old Bangalore after a fracas at a pub involving cops. His sister, all of 15 and who was with him in the pub, called her parents, partying elsewhere, to say that big bro was in trouble.

In a scene straight out of a sitcom, the mother, Judith, got into the act at the police station and allegedly pushed an officer who injured his finger.

What's going on?

While the world and his wife will say Gen Y is a set of narcissistic yobs that has no perspective of what is right and wrong, one can also spare a thought for how some of its members came to be that way.

No ground laid

In many cases, say mental health professionals, this perspective doesn't exist because it was never instilled in the first place. "In many well-off families," says Murali Raj, Head of the Department of Psychiatry, Manipal Hospital, "disciplining does not take place properly because parents are rarely at home and are too busy with other things. So children do not inculcate these values from their parents."

Or, as a journalist points out: "Perhaps these kids are well behaved at home but the families have a different set of values where they feel they owe nothing to others."

Values aside, plain old commonsense, which is definitely easier within reach than a Long Island Iced Tea, would say that one doesn't finger the sahukars in khaki unless one is looking for trouble. Such rules of thumb, however, have been eroded in recent times by the belief that money can buy your way out of any difficulty. "There is also an attitude that you can get away by paying out bribes, and that attitude is usually learnt from the parents," adds Dr. Raj.

Commonsense is acquired through experience and interaction with all kinds of classes and generations. Under current modes of urban development, however, privileged individuals can find ways to live out entire lives with a narrow, myopic cultural perspective.

"The class divide manifests itself in a divide in terms of what schools and colleges one studies in, what social circles one moves around in, what jobs one does, and what sort of life one lives," says Arun G., a law student.

"Today, it is entirely possible to inhabit microcultures in which the laws of the state are not a high priority."

Certainly there are those who grow up thinking they are a law unto themselves. Examples of those who literally get away with murder are numerous.

It also makes you wonder how normal a childhood their children can have.

However, we're not just talking of celebs (big-time as well as local ones) here.

Delusions of grandeur are very much evident in several sections of society, especially those living in closed communities"You would think that professor's children growing up in sylvan surroundings in an atmosphere of learning would turn out to be model students," says Priya, a linguistic scholar.

Santosh, working in an ad agency, grew up on campus and he concurs when he says: "All of us university kids hung out together. The others could have been from some other planet for all we cared."

Communities are created when people of a similar profession or geographical location get together and there is safety in numbers.

But when a community closes ranks, it shuts off the chance of an outside perspective and also sets itself as law unto itself. Adam Bidapa was merely acting according to the rules of his community — the community of hyped-up local celebrity.

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