【2011.02.25 今日印度】Secret life of Indian teens

青蛙小王子

"I am a virgin. But I know everything about everything," Mimi, a 15-year-old Bangalore girl, flips her ponytail, looking around to make sure all eyes are on her. "Everyone I know has touched first base, at least." That's "kissing and necking", she explains to her parents. Notes are regularly exchanged between girls after sexual encounters and discarded i-Pill packs are often found in the bathrooms of the posh convent she studies in. "I'm sure you won't remain a virgin by the time you turn 18," her mother interjects tearfully. "Dude, will you let me finish," Mimi rebukes. "I'm not stupid enough to get into trouble."


Trouble is the one certain truth about her: she is a teenager. A face among the nation's 250 million adolescents- the world's largest. But how well does the nation know her? Not enough, going by the furore over the new Protection of Children From Sexual Offences Bill, 2010 proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development ("Does it mean 12-year-olds will start having sex?"). But now a host of surveys is figuring out what it means to be a teenager: they pack in 38 hours of activities into a day- work, chat, browse, talk, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, smoke, drink, splurge, do drugs, have sex, get pregnant-and they can't wait for the future to arrive. Unknown to the nation at large, teenage seems to have taken on a whole new meaning. To Delhibased counsellor Gitanjali Kapoor, it's a cultural moment: "Constant exposure of different types of media is enhancing their inquisitiveness, encouraging them to question and stretch their boundaries."

TEENSPEAK Code words to outwit adults FWB: Friends With Benefits UMFRIEND: Boyfriend LMAO: Laughing My Ass Off ITILU: I Think I Love You @@@: Parents Nearby THUD: Depressing 8: Oral Sex SEXTING: Sexual Text Message C-P: Sleepy

Not that the teens care. For them, it's LOL (Lots Of Love) all the way. Sex is cool because, gosh, everybody's doing it. Twenty-five out of 100 teenage girls in a big-city school are sexually active, reports the Indian Association of Paediatricians. But to Taki, 19, a Delhi girl (who prefers to be known by her nickname like the rest of her peer group in this story), that's a gross underassessment: "Over 75 per cent of my classmates are not virgins". Some of them are into serious romance, some are "just FWBs" ("Friends With Benefits. Not dating but together... just a convenience thing".) Some boys carry condoms in their pockets because they don't know when "they might get lucky". During high school socials, dark corners of the venue are "reserved" by couples beforehand, so that they can go and "do it" in a crowded room, "just for the thrill of it", Mimi explains.
In the world of adults, statistic is truth. And surveys reveal*, it's a generation that spends 10 hours a day on some sort of a media, two hours on social networking sites, 1.6 hours on the phone, four hours 23 minutes a week on computer games. While 66 per cent carry mobile phones to school, 47 per cent can't live without TV. Over 45 per cent drink alcohol five times a month and 14 per cent use tobacco. Yet 70 per cent teens show signs of depression and 48 per cent think about suicide. A survey released by one of Bollywood's biggest hits last year, Udaan-all about a 17-year-old boy, who gets expelled from boarding school for sneaking out to watch a semi-porn film-shows: one in five teens watches porn before age 13; every second teen necks and kisses, 15 per cent in the school loo; one out of five claims to have had sex; 90 per cent believe in premarital sex, with 45 per cent of girls opting for clandestine abortions.

COOL RULES Objects of desire for the teen jet-setter PING ME: No longer a corporate toy, BlackBerry now makes or breaks teen happiness (and dad's bank account) with free BBM messages. BIG FOOT: Justin Bieber wears these. So every teenager craves, Supra, the seriously cool sneaker with ankle support. KICK OFF: If everybody loves cricket, go for soccer. It's up with United or down with Chelsea. Rooney or Drogba. Take your pick. Start a war. BOSS ACT: Who wants mom to sweat in the kitchen? Private bartenders now mix up drinks and provide finger foods at birthday parties. SMOKE UP: Fruit flavoured tobacco from a pipe dipped in water or wine. Hookah bars are all the rage. iPAD TEENS: The latest crave. Cell phone, laptop, iPod, PSP, Kindle, DVD player-Apple iPad combines it all.

If every generation needs a cultural marker, Facebook is the canvas on which the digitally nimble teens spill their secrets. What used to be the rush to the school canteen to tell everyone what's going on has become the rush to social networking sites. "We are the original Facebook generation," says Soapy, 17, a Kolkata boy now based in Delhi. "It took off in 2004, just as we started getting our hands on computers." It's also the new status symbol and an attitude signal. "It can make you or break you." He spends 45 minutes a day on Facebook ("My cousin Miko checks it every hour"), has 600 Facebook friends ("Oh, some have 2,000") and has not changed his profile picture for eight months ("So people are not poking me as much as they used to"). Mimi says, everyone, even 11-12 year-olds, has a Facebook account: "They all say they are 18". Ask her how, and she says "Duh!".

10 THINGS TEENAGERS WON'T TELL YOU... 30 per centare not comfortable talking to their parents about their own problems. 67 per cent of all school students cheat in an exam, at least once. 45 per cent teenage girls would prefer to terminate unwanted pregnancies without telling their parents. 21 per cent teenagers get unwanted demands for sexual activity from strangers on the Net. 1 out of 5 is smoking at an alarming rate of 13 to 15 sticks a day. 65 per cent face persisting problems to which they see no solution. 1 in 2 teen necks and kisses. 1 in 5 teen watches porn before age 13 15 per cent drink alcohol when they are bored. 47 per cent play games on their mobile.

10 THINGS ABOUT TEENS THAT MAKE PARENTS MAD... Watching primetime reality shows that titillate. 76 per cent do it. 48 per cent contemplate suicide. 90 per cent show extreme reluctance to go to school. Rising demand for pocket money ("My friend gets RS20,000 a month".) 85 per cent teens think tuitions bring high scores. 90 per cent teens believe in pre-marital sex. Everybody has it. That's what 71 per cent of teens say when asking for fancy frills-MP3 to camera phones. 45 per centof Class XII students drink alcohol 5 times a month. 70 per cent show mood swings and bad temper. 17 years is the average age of initiation into drugs in big cities.

"Duh" is a slice of teen sarcasm aimed at people who state the obvious. What it hides is the danger of entering the world of strangers when you are not quite ready for it. Exactly what happened this week to two teens in Mumbai when they allegedly typed "what's up?" to strike a chat with their principal on Facebook and followed it up with "F***k off" and "Go to hell". One got away. But censured at home and suspended from school for a month, the younger boy, 13, has possibly learnt the lesson of his life. "It's the nature of the medium," says Shelja Sen, consultant psychologist in Delhi, "You can't be held accountable. You don't have eye contact. And you can be as nasty and aggressive as you please." Soapy has a different explanation: "Facebook is like a road. You can bump into anybody but would you speak to all and sundry? Younger people just don't get it. They are not the Facebook generation, you see."
Despite those highs and lows, Facebook is the place where they measure each other's cool quotient. And every teen is aware of the subterranean war of attitude and outlook that rages on the social networking website. As everyone checks out everyone else, the profiles send out varying signals. A massive friend count means, "Don't expect me to give you too much attention." A nicely photoshopped Wall indicates, "I am so weird, wacky and wonderful." Profile shots updated on hourly basis mean, "Check me out, I'm cool".

DATING AND MATING Decoding the new rules of romanceBUDDY BENEFIT: Friends With Benefits are friends of the opposite sex who fulfill needs. No commitment. No demands. No problem.BF VS GF: You can hug your "guy friends" casually, but you can't hug your "boyfriend" in front of your parents.PLENTY CHOICE: Multiple dating is smart: you are not too hung up on any one person. And that makes you more attractive.BASIC INSTINCT: Baseball metaphors are in. First base = kissing, second and third base = kissing and touching, with and without clothes. Home run = sex.Pocket money for 15-plus teens in the metros ranges between Rs 6,000-20,000 a month.

If you look bad in a photograph, you will be tagged 'Hahaha'. To avoid that label, the pressure to look good on sites goes up tremendously and vanity becomes the byword. "I know girls who put in 'photo albums' of their face taken from different angles," says Rahi, a 14-year-old Mumbai student. The most-feared word among girls, not surprisingly, is "fugly"-a combination of fat and ugly-she points out. "For boys, the in thing now is to flaunt sixpack abs, if they have it," points out Soapy. "And a lot of people are posting pictures taken in a loo-home or a fivestar- in front of the mirror."
Mimi's primary function on Facebook is to keep in touch with boys she meets at socials. She has a lot of "guy friends" and she helps them check out profiles of interesting girls ("Girls they can hit on"). For Rahi, it's a great way to flirt with boys ("I can say things I could never say on their face"). The moment Piu, 15, a student of Modern High School in Kolkata, started dating a year ago, she announced it to the world by changing her "relationship status" from "single to engaged" ("I loved the attention I got".) Her friend, Mou, recalls the only time her parents banned Facebook: "I changed my relationship status to 'widowed' when I broke up with my boyfriend. Some people reported to my parents and there was a huge drama at home."
The year was 2004, when a sex clip, passed around by a bragging schoolboy to his friends, made its way to video disc-sellers in Delhi. The MMS scandal and its unapologetic teen hero and heroine sent shockwaves across urban India, even making it to the iconic Anurag Kashyap film, Dev.D. Today, most teens seem to know couples who post intimate photographs for joy, of girls who get flamed on the Net, of friends who are stalked and bullied by strangers on the cyber space. According to a survey done by Chennaibased NGO, Tulir, 42 per cent of teens on the Net face harassment online. But Taki reassures: "Chill. You can make your account secure. And, really, everybody's smart enough to avoid unknown people on the Net."

TIME TO 'PARDEEE' A heady brew of drinking, dancing, mingling, laughing across the metrosMERRY TIPPLERS: There's a vodka epidemic out there,with teens drinking shots-neat, with energy drinks or as kamikaze.BAR BUZZ: There are two ways of getting into pubs: with an older boyfriend.Or dressing up in minis and looking older.PRIME TARGET: Professional party organisers target popular boys in well-known schools and colleges and pay them to get more teens in. Parties are given taboo names like Delusion or Ecstasy.It's enough of a hook to reel them in.PARTY GAME: 'Truth and Dare' is a favourite. Expect questions like, "What's your favourite sex position?" or "Who do you think of when you are horny?" 80 per centof those visiting pubs and bars in metros are underage.

Thousands throng the narrow lanes of Chennai's Burma Bazaar, off Anna Salai, where stalls are piled high with fake electronic brands, mobile phone, pirated movie CDs, imported cameras, LCD TVs, music layers and iPods. It's the hub of Chennai's grey market and one of the hottest in the country. And violent 3D animation sex video games are the hot picks here. But you don't get them over the counter. They are picked up by Internet browsing centres across the city. It all starts with a pop-up, where a woman prompts the browser to undress her. That leads to violent sex games. "It is the ad pop-up that traps them," says K. Srinivasan, co-founder of Cyber Crime Society of India. "More than 50 per cent of the victims are young children from affluent families."
Gopal, 13, of Chennai got sucked into this world of sleaze. It all started with a pop-up a year ago. It flashed a woman and prompted him to undress her. He did and got trapped via unending windows into a website of violent sex-filled games. It became a habit until one day his father accidentally clicked the Internet history button and discovered a long list of websites with names like Playboy, Leisure Suit Lady, Guy Game and PC Rape. The cyber crime unit of the police traced it back to the narrow lanes of Burma Bazaar, and the Internet browsing centre that was beaming it. But to Soapy, watching pornography on the Net is way too common. "I barely know boys who wouldn't see it every day," he says. "I know of some who check porn sites on the phone even in class."
For a different kind of kick, follow the jukebox, step up the narrow stairs and you'll be lucky to find an empty table inside the glass-covered smoking den in the café at Connaught Place in Delhi. Here the average age is 18. Near the plate glass window, overlooking the central park, a teenager is relaxing over a paperback and a smoke. In the next table, another is blowing smoke rings and watching his friends, a girl and a boy, pop French fries into each other's mouth. Near the door, three girls in jeans and tees are texting furiously and puffing away to glory. This year, in an 11 metro Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) survey on 3,000 teenagers, Mumbai, Goa and Cochin top, with as many as 80 per cent teens lighting their first cigarette at age 14.

FACEBOOK FADS It's a war over personal space in the virtual worldUNDER AGE: Facebookwants to keep out the below-13. So what? We can fudge the books. Err… age.SNAPSHOTS: In an age of attention scarcity, this is the platform for grabbing eyeballs. Stay on top and update your photos by the hour.HOW OFTEN: 45 minutes a day sounds like a lot? Nah. Two hours is average, with many checking it out every hour.FRIEND COUNT: An average user has 130 friends, reports Facebook. Cool. But maxing the friends' tally to four digits is cooler.TOILET SHOT: Taking a picture of oneself in the mirror,in front of the bathroom mirror-be it at home or in a five-star-is in vogue.STATUS CONSCIOUS: Get into a fight with your BF and change your status from "in a relationship"to "it's complicated". Work things out and change it again.8 out of 10 schoolchildren are on social networking sites.

Drugs are just a step away, but everyone counts "junkies" in their friend circle. "Tu to charsi hai" (you are a junkie), they are fondly told. "Out of 50 very close friends, 10 would be into casual doping, and five hardcore addicts," says Neo, 15, who studies in Shri Ram School in Delhi. "But they don't disturb anyone and keep to themselves." If in 2001, the age of initiation stood at 20, today, it averages at 17, says the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Is the trend dipping further? Schoolchildren seem to be experimenting with a whole range of drugs. A 2010 study on 2,000 Shimla school students by the NGO Youth Enlightening finds drug abuse among 55 per cent boys and 24 per cent girls. It's so common that Jojo, 19, who started "sniffing" at the age of 15, says, "I could do it in class and the teacher wouldn't know."
But there is another variety of teens who deal with drugs. Nikhil is 15 and spends more hours on the Internet than at school. And right now he is browsing the Net for a little-known flower called Morning Glory. Not the flower, he wants the seeds. He is already a part of half-a-dozen herb Web groups and has located one that can courier him the seeds. After that, he will move on to websites that can deliver petroleum ether. He will then comb through the Net for websites that chronicle drug recipes and dosages. His aim is simple: he wants to be a "drug geek" and kick off a clandestine career by creating the magic potion for homegrown LSD. The 15-year-old doesn't know that he is a sitting duck for drug traffickers, who target social networking sites to recruit youngsters to work as peddlers.
Mimi is waiting for her annual exams to get over so that she can "Pardeeeeee". Her school is just a stone's throw away from Bangalore's pub district and is surrounded by boys' schools and colleges. No wonder, her after-school hours are spent in this locality. It doesn't matter that she is underage. "Bars almost never ask for proof of identity, or age." If they do, she goes in with an older boyfriend. "You need to wear clothes that make you look older, say minis," she laughs. With beer and hookah on offer at popular cafés and fast food joints and "Happy Hours" starting early at pubs, teens are free to party. And hard liquor is in. "No one goes to pubs to drink breezers or beer," says Neo. All the more reason why Happy Hours-offering two drinks for the price of one-are precious. "We go drinking during afternoons, after school when Happy Hours just start," he says.
"The latest trend is to post events announcements on Facebook," says Neo. "Party organisers target popular boys in well-known schools and colleges and pay them to get more people." Taki just can't forget her last birthday party, where 45 friends turned up, fashionably after 10.30 at night and bar tenders served "shots" of vodka and kamikaze with finger foods. "Everybody gets drunk at everybody's party," she laughs. She could well be a spokesperson for the legions of underage drinkers living it up across the nation. A recent survey of 1,000 people in the 14-24 age group conducted by the Community Against Drunken Driving in the capital finds about a third of teens in the 16-18 age group are drinking at pubs and bars, with 35 per cent picking up hard liquor from authorised vendors.
Young Indians are the happiest in the world. So say surveys. Not the stick-thin teen who visits the psychology department of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi regularly, though. She gets excruciating stomach aches that start just when she goes to school and become so acute that she is often sent home. Despite a battery of tests and countless pills, the pain continues to rage. But she's in good company now. AIIMS researchers are studying precisely this phenomenon- Recurrent Abdominal Pains (RAP)- which they come across increasingly among students across the country. And RAP is a classic sign of stress, they report: 90 per cent resist going to school, 70 per cent are irritable and depressed, 65 per cent face "problems" to which they see no solution and 36 per cent find it difficult to keep pace with their peer group. "Failure is one word that gives this generation nightmares. Stress is a manifestation of that attitude," says Dr Manju Mehta, head of child psychology at AIIMS.
Not quite adolescent, not quite adult. Nobody knows what to make of the new liberated teen. The tech savvy Facebook Generation has had much more-clothes, toys, gadgets- than their parents ever did. And as Kapoor says, the new technological progress is making them experience "an uncertain and confused state of maturity." The permutations and combinations of teenage have gone all topsy-turvy. Will India's New Teens manage to turn their unusual Net-freedom and global exposure into new tools for change? Meantime, Mimi has decided not to get married to her boyfriend ("I'm probably going to break up next week"). She is all fired up with the idea of "multiple dating". "Why are you going out with a boy who is dating six other girls," asks her mother, and Mimi sighs in exasperation: "I'm also dating other guys, so what's the problem?"
- with Swagata Sen, Lakshmi Subramaniam, Gunjeet Sra, Kruttika Kallury, Parul, Prachi Rege and Shutapa Paul
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/130880/most-popular/secret-life-of-indian-teens.html

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