Seriously Sandeep

Sagarika Ghose hath penned a furious piece on the state of the Indian youth. In a tone that reminds you of a middle-aged, spinster aunty threatening to spank the unruly kids, she blasts away.

Our great hope is that 65 per cent of our population is under the age of 35. But has India’s youth inherited the worst traits of their elders and tossed out the best, like yesterday’s hawai chappals? Is the mantra, ‘the system sucks’, leading to total normlessness? In the Sixties and Seventies, youth movements were generally ideological, based on attacking ideas rather than individuals. Today, youth protests have changed dramatically. The anti-reservation stir this year was no doubt an example of a powerful youth movement, wherein many sincere young people participated in the debates and voiced legitimate concerns about the future.

This article is entitled Gone to Seed, which is quite appropriate. Only, it should be qualified with something like Gone to Seed conceived while on Weed. I’m not good at rhyming and I didn’t have a heart to say drug abuse.

The piece isn’t worth even this bit of dissection it has received here but indulge me. All those unruly, violent students deserve her auntie-like fury but why the hell did she have to lump bloggers into that category.

Scan the blogosphere and you’ll find several vicious armchair 20-somethings vomiting out defamatory and bloodthirsty sentiments about strangers who they would, it would appear from their blogs, like to murder.

In another age, when access to information was severely cramped, none could question the authority of such foaming-at-the-mouth “articles.” All right, people could and would question, it’s just that their views weren’t published. With bloggers ripping their stupidities apart regularly, these guys are (understandably) pissed off. Add to that the fact that these overfed morons–in India we call some of them as journalists–woke up too late in the day to discover that there’s a strange creature called “weblog.” Actually, that’s a trifle incorrect. They really didn’t wake up. What slapped them rudely awake was the fact that these monsters bit really hard, and that’s what awakened them in the first place. Also the issue, which… I’ll let Neha say this:

Sagarika Ghose. You should be careful. This awful generation is about to take your job away.

Clap clap clap.

But what they did was worse. But then, it’s all part of their hoary tradition: join them if you can’t beat them. And so, these worthies scrambled, really quickly, and set up their own blogs: and no, I steadfastly refuse to grant them traffic.

Tailpiece: Not surprisingly, one person sympathizes with her obnoxious generalization about bloggers. He knows where Sagarika Ghose is coming from for he’s been there before. Many times. No prizes for guessing who I’m talking about. The fun, which death had temporarily ended, has (re)begun. And I was wrong.