It’s been more than sixteen years since Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge was released. That means that the people who were impressionable teenagers when it released have now started having kids of their own. And in about six or seven years, they will be enthusiastically telling the kids about what an awesome movie it is and how the kids should watch it too.
The kids will then watch it, and a whole new generation will get infected with the idea that being an annoying jerk and a stalker is a good way to get the girl. (Hollywood, for all its faults, has never combined the two – either you have straight up stalkers as in Twilight, or you have the annoying jerks. Or to be fair, none that I’ve noticed.)
The only hope for future generations is that Kids Those Days will have no culture and values and thus ignore the advice of their parents, or if they watch it, to watch it with extreme sarcasm and eyerolling about the shit their parents watched.
Similarly, the tendency for Kids These Days to be Kids These Days is my greatest hope after reading this very scary story about the Bajrang Dal’s summer camps (link via Mihir S Sharma, discovered via Prayaag Akbar‘s retweet):
THERE WERE speeches: “Be weary of six M’s,” the boys were told from a booming microphone. “Muslims, Missionaries, Marxists, Lord Macaulay, foreign Media and Maino [UPA President Sonia Gandhi’s middle name].”
The warning of an apocalypse: Kalyug is upon us. The Muslims are taking over the country by converting Hindus, by pretending to be Hindu and marrying our women. Hindus will soon be extinct. Already the Muslims exceed Hindus in India. We must remove the mullahs from our country. They kill our Gau Mata; each cow has 2,300 devis inside her. (“We can’t trust Muslims, they don’t even spare our cows, why will they spare us?” says Anil, 14, the son of a vegetable vendor in Delhi.)
Since it is only a week long, I am optimistic that eventually about ninety percent of the boys who attended will discover girls (or boys, if that’s what floats their boat), and put the camp completely out of their mind, much to the despair of their parents and camp counselors.
We probably should be worried about the other ten percent, but if it wasn’t for the tendency of teenagers to treat the instructions of older people with contempt, things would be so much worse.
Very nice piece. If disdain for elders is the way to prevent sanity of our kids, then so be it. I rather prefer that my kid overrules my insane advice and be rational and gain global values… Aadisht, why not share your writings with a wider audience of similar interests? I invite you to join The South Reports (http://tsr.net.co), a blogging platform where your writings can have a larger audience and more interaction. You can post there and link back to your own blogs so TSR readers can discover your blogs too. Here is the sign up form: http://www.tsr.net.co/main/authorization/signUp?
Keep writing! Wish you successful blogging in 2012!
Kanti