Teenagers Graduating to Adult Games

Abductions, rapes, murders, shoot-outs, blackmails, deploying hired assassins etc. etc. are all familiar adult sports, world over, until the end of second millennium. Acid throwing, eve teasing, ragging and such others were primary games played by teenagers, particularly in the countries like India. Readers of international, national and local news cannot fail to notice that such sports are no longer confined to the adults or teenagers respectively. Age barriers have melted down. Lot of teenagers are catching up with adults and have been acquiring the necessary skill-set and perfecting them, perhaps with an intention of making it their trade as they grow up and make a niche place for themselves in the society. Surely, the big and small screens (also the smaller ones on desktop/laptop and mobile screens) have immensely contributed to the learning process involved in it. A fait accompli?.

It is certainly an alarming trend to note that many kids who are below the teen-age bracket have started practicing these teenage and adult games with impunity and with significant success. It is difficult for the analysts, sociologists and criminologists to understand whether it is due to:

a) Children are growing up faster than ever before b) aforesaid screen based media has been imparting more education than necessary c) it is a paradigm shift brought in by the third millennium d) factors, which are yet to be identified, or e) a combination of all these factors, which is here to stay.

All the common people in our society including you and me, moralists, social workers, politicians, lawmakers, law-enforcers are all busy playing the games appropriate to their age and social hierarchy. None has time to notice these nascent visible trends let alone take measures to reverse them.

As civilization progresses, we cannot retard the advancement of the people and the society. There is precious little we can do to make people play games, according to the prevailing age groups. However, not all is lost. We can redefine age groups based on the games people play in contemporary society and remove the anomaly. The solution lies in bringing in a legislation and make a constitutional amendment to redefine the age groups in line with current realities so that broadly people fall into the age groups based on the games they play, at least for some more time. This might restore the social order to a reasonable level. Let us trust that such a move gets the wholehearted support of the elected representatives of both the houses of Parliament.