Teenage and Conflict

(Day 56 of 112)

The place I live in at the present can best be described as a teenager – someone going through an identity crisis. Just like a teenager is somewhere in the confusing space between being a child and being an adult, so is this place somewhere between being a small town and an average sized city.

You know adolescence has hit when the physical changes become obvious. I’m not going into the details here but suffice to say a teenager begins looking different probably before he/she thinks or even does differently. In the same manner, this place is undergoing a physical change – buildings, malls, shopping complexes, multiplexes, restaurants, hotels, wider roads, highways and all that jazz. This change is definitely creating the equivalent of hormonal imbalance here and the result is that the people are left feeling conflicted.

The conflict is exactly the same as it is with teenagers. In the case of teenagers, they don’t know what is expected of them and most times end up doing the wrong thing – behave inappropriately, either too grown up or not grown up enough. They want to remain children because that’s what they know. But at the same time want to experiment with being adults because, well, they’ve always worshipped the adults around them and perhaps dreamt of doing grown up things. The same is happening here in this place. While everyone would probably be more comfortable with their small town life, they want to see how it is to be a city, all grown up. They have dreamt of doing city things and can’t resist the opportunity to experiment.

So this place where I live is in the throes of an identity crisis. They want malls and multiplexes. But they also shy away at the prices at these malls and multiplexes. They want a Pizza Hut and Dominoes here but prefer eating pizzas that come with amul cheese grated on top. They want fancy eateries with ‘english’ foods but are not comfortable eating in a kitchen that also cooks non-vegetarian food. They want a Mc Donalds but prefer the Marwari vada-pav.

They want to seem modern but can’t seem to stop staring at a girl who drives her self around, confidently independent.

They want to become an adult, a big city, but before that they have to go through that dark place called teenage.