PUNK AND PROUD

A long long time ago when the Sun rose in the East and set to rest in the west, I was a testosterone-filled teen.

We lived in the era of Punks amidst torn jeans with patches, leather jackets with studs and leather wrist bands again with studs, but one of those sharp kinds and yes, long dreadlocks was the in-thing.

Who needed discussions on climate change and environmental pollution back those days, because as you walked across the alley the preying eyes of those gangs with blood-shot eyes, with knuckles and reeking with alcohol was bad enough - they used to club you or break teeth with knuckles those day, no guns.

Importantly, there were always droopy-eyed girls around speaking idyllically about Moksha, Movies and the sweet smell of Marijuana and of course Revolution. You watched the lips moving in slow motion and heard stuff that are usually played on a broken record. Now you have DJs doing the same sound effect, without encouraging any lust or longing.

The hostel guards got their daily grass, some friendly teachers joined in, in fact we lived in an unspoiled world – we needed just that last stagger for the revolution to take place to place us inside Utopia – instead we stumbled into bed!

Now it is politically incorrect – I don’t like this term anyway – to say a lot many things. Moreover, teachers can’t spank the shit out of the arse of school children, you can’t sing happily the jingle of condoms while watching TVs with the family that included grandpa, grandma aunts, uncles, mom, dad, brothers sisters, and a whole lot of cousins. Coming to cousins they no longer ask what kind of biscuit is that, to the 'family' again during TV hours, when there was an ad about sanitary napkin packet - wow things surely have changed.

These days, boys and girls have information overload and have, moreover, taken to Facebook, Twitter, and Whatnot and they are saying a lot more things than us, but in a different manner, which some of us erstwhile Punks understand, but don’t entirely relate to.

In India, we see a whole lot of new generation kids, tech savvy – back in our time we longed for a TV – with a bag full of information, which they are disseminating at a furious pace. Had Facebook been invented in our Marijuana-laced world decades back, we would have first slowly created a four-dimensional figure of the word inside the psychedelic head, torn the word bit by bit to find it’s true meaning looking hours on the page and prodded endlessly about the lives of millions on the site.

There is no time for these craps. These kids now ‘like’ everything. A new picture, a new status or even when someone breaks up saying “finally I did it.” What the heck, “I finally-did-it” kinda break up in our times was nothing to like about modestly - it was an adrenaline rush, an opportunity up for grabs with both hands!

We are what we were, a Bob Marley, always at the Doors jamming with not one, but three little birds and we surely were Comfortably Numb. At times it was the Beatles, Bob Dylan or Queen rapsodysing about Jude or walking alone as the Tambourine Man. I still have the urge to take those stairways to Utopia.