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?
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?
posted by Sangeeta at
3:07 AM
1 Comments:
very true and very brilliantly written.
i apologise if i m wrong or being judjemental but i have noticed that u r always writing about the paradoxes of our life and the way our society functions. i agree u r right in terms of the facts but have u ever thought that u r also a part of this same unfair society and even u act in the same way that it does.
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Anonymous, at 3:46 AM
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