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COVER STORY: URBAN YOUTH
Money Of New Generation
In teen vernacular,
pocket money has become passe. Aditya Aggarwal, a 21-year-old from Kolkata,
and his 17-year-old brother Abhijeet, prefer to surf for colleges on the
Net rather than go to the local American Center to pore over the directories.
On weekends they take their family car out, pick their friends and drive
to Ffort Radisson Hotel in Raichak, about 80 km out of town. "And
if it gets late we just crash in the hotel rooms." That costs about
Rs 1,500 per night but its helps that his father has one of the hotel's
privilege cards. Pocket money is a dirty word. "It means that I have
to limit my spending," clarifies Abhijeet. "I can run through
a few thousand bucks in a short while so I prefer asking my parents whatever
I need."
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Pocket money is passe.
Credit card is the new ticket to the good life.
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That's where a
no-limit Amex Gold credit helps. Or a faithful combo of Visa and Mastercard.
These powerful pieces of PVC are the essential corollary of consumerism,
the new money of the new generation. Kamal, a 20-year-old from Chennai's
Vaishnav College, pays for all his expenses-including frequent trip to
the coffee pubs and snooker centres-with his credit card. Kanika Madhok,
a 20-year-old at Delhi's Jesus and Mary College, has the entire lot of
dependent cards, paid dutifully by her businessman father who says that
he implicitly trusts his daughter's spending wisdom and knows that "she
will not go overboard".
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"The ad Go Get It
symbolises their belief system."
Achal Bhagat, psychologist
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"Youngsters have no role models," says
Tiwari. "Celebrities are simply people who party." Quick burnouts,
alcohol and drug addiction, misguided value systems and alienation among
family members are logical fallouts. There is also an aspiration-trickle
effect: India has a huge backward class segment that continually apes
the middle class who in turn look for models in the West, creating a vicious
whirlpool of desire and distress. Says psychoanalyst Asish Nandy: "They
are the disadvantaged classes and they will realise that only much later.
The isolation of consumerism as a lifestyle choice has been tried out
in the West and found lacking. There has been a sharp rise in urban violence
as well as greater referrals to the psychiatrist." True, brawls,
beating and gunshots sounds are becoming all too common. In fact at the
disco Mirage in Delhi glass beer bottles have been banned because they
become a handy tool for violence. And parents feel the stress as much
as the children. Says M. Kulkarni, Rama Kulkarni's mother: "When
Rama got into junior college she demanded a car. This time we had to give
her Maruti 800, apart from an ICICI card. She's asking for a cell phone
but she'll get that only after her BFA." For the sunrise generation
of millennium India, the luck has turned. But the tables? Shrug. Cigarette
dangling from the lip, gelled, black forelock Latinesque over an eyebrow,
waist high jeans and the babe in Mui Mui. The party goes on.
--With Natasha Israni, Sonia Faleiro, Stephen David,
Kavita Muralidharan, Labonita Ghosh and Himanshi Dhawan
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