Yesterday my friend and I were discussing the rage of reality shows in television. She said she watches many of these shows like Indian Idol, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa, On The Job etc and likes them too. Even I used to watch them a few years ago when this trend initially started with M T V’s talent hunt show (whose name I don’t remember) that produced an all girls music band named Viva. It was a big hit at that time as it was a new concept at the time when television was dominated by Ekta Kapur’s saas-bahu serials and their repeat telecasts. But fortunately I lost interest in them just after Viva went unemployed and then eventually split.

I have noticed that they are all very similar shows featuring similar people- basically youngsters from small towns who are striving to erase their anonymity by being picked up in a talent-hunt contest. They come from similar places and want to transport magically into the same glittering fancyland. In all these shows the background of individuals seems to be of immense importance and the emphasis is very often on the modest circumstances that they come from in order to highlight the variation success in a show like this brings. In most of the shows the contestants are expected to possess something called the X factor that eventually turns out to be nothing more that some blonde streaks in ones hair.
And another thing that the producers of these shows never miss is to encourage the contestants as well as the judges to be emotionally unstable for which they truly find ways. The contestants are meant to touch any and everybody’s feet every few minutes, speak in a voice choked in emotion, perform well and faint if they are eliminated- in that order.

In these shows success seems to be the amplification of who you already are. I have not known any winner of such shows actually making it big on his own after the grand launch they get at the conclusion of the show although they give up their career and possibly a lot more to take part in them.

The 16-year-old who was allowed to perform a surgery under the doting and splendid pushing of his parents is a sign of our times. While its yet another example of Indian obsession with records, particularly those involving the Guinness Book of World Records, it raises questions of a larger kind.

What is the ‘right’ age for doing anything and why? Who decides it and for what reason? Why is it okay to travel on half ticket till you are 12, drive and vote for a government at 18 but wait till 21 to get married if you are a man and 25 to start drinking if you happen to live in Delhi? The law protects the young through an array of laws and yet has no qualms in sending our young ones to die in the name of country before they are ready to buy a drink!

By definition, the correlation between age and maturity is a fuzzy one. Some people are incredibly mature at 14 while the rest of us were just growing up. Bill Gates started learning computer languages when he was 13 and I didn’t even know how to play computer games at that age! And yet, in general, it is fair to relate age with maturity and to create a system to protect the young from others and from their own selves. The problem is that legislative action is fact-insensitive; so a drunk brat who kills innocent bystanders get its protection while a 19-year-old in consensual relationship with someone a year younger can get hauled up for statutory rape.

Of course, one can argue that this is the price one has to pay in order to have an impartial system of judicial protection and the law needs a measure of blindness to be effective.

The deeper issue I see is how we as a society view age. Today we have three-year olds playing piano and tennis, and in many cases, both. We make Budhia run marathons, and 5-year-olds spin to item songs.

I see the images of the young being highly sexualised. T V serials present the young as miniature adults who are on sexual quest from as early as the age of five. They are kissing each other and celebrating Valentine’s-day before they learn to ride a cycle. School children in our serials are never without make up and latest hairstyles; they hike up their skirts and bare their biceps. The magazines they talk about are Femina and Vogue and not Champak or Chacha Choudhary.

And yet the law is paranoid in its legislative protection of the young. Parents are trapped between encouraging talented-ness and legislative protection and are unclear on how they want their young to behave. Adolescents are often characterized as confused, but is it really them who should carry this tag?