No, it is not about the influence! The influence of alcohol, drugs or tobacco, when we misbehave at a party. Or Bollywood, where we watch movies and learn shitty things. Or the influence of bad company, where our friends come up with a devious plan of spoiling us rotten. It is not about any of these things, it is only about the choices we make in our lives. It is about how we decide to behave in a certain situation, how much we decide to drink and how much we allow the movies to affect us. We all are responsible individuals and mark my words when I say, it is all about us and our choices.
It is about being coward enough to blame it on the alcohol. People think drinking and smoking makes the youth bad, but I beg to differ, experiencing a high is a temporary thing, it is not something that defines the youth. Whatever people do when they’re high is a reflection of their true nature and in this case the nature of inebriation cannot be blamed. People don’t just randomly get into drugs, they choose to drug themselves, they are responsible for it and they know it may not be the best thing to do to themselves but they do it anyway. There are people who drink responsibly also, who smoke once in a blue moon and avoid drugs, you can’t keep generalizing and calling everyone senseless.
And well, who doesn’t go to the movies, we all do, right? Bollywood is the biggest source of entertainment for our country but do we all start behaving like the good for nothing hero who falls for every second chick he lays his eyes on? No, we don’t! Because we have the sense of choice, we can decide sensibly whose footsteps we want to follow and who we want to shut out. Young people who watch movies, watch all sorts of movies- good, bad and worse, but some of them choose to become ruffians as oppose to the good guys. Movies were made with the sole purpose of entertaining the masses, for God’s sake, stop blaming the filmmakers for the bad future of your son.
‘Peer pressure’ are words that parents coined, they made the children believe that they are naïve and can very easily get affected by the way their friends behave. But the truth is that we all have like a million friends and we cannot possibly get affected by all of them. We cannot follow our friends because they are almost as dumb as we are and we like following people who are at least smarter than us. Friends usually do not fall under that category. Whatever we are, is what we choose to be, out of the millions of options that were available to us, this is what we picked. So deal with it and stop putting everything on our friends.
The weirdest part is everybody on the face of this earth was young and crazy at some point in time, it has been a ritual to blame the youth in every decade. Hence, everybody has seen the phase which the youth is seeing right now. Yet, everybody turned out to be pretty okay and so will we. There is absolutely no reason to rush our process of growing up or think that we all will grow up to be criminals. Just let us experience things, make our share of mistakes and learn from them to become solid individuals.
Influence is a strong word and has the most application in the negative terms. Today’s youth is known to be carried away easily and thus landing on the wrong path. Call it the peer pressure or the impact of Bollywood, our young boys and girls are going far away in the race of being ‘cool’.
Being the guardian, it is for all of us to explain the right and wrong to our young people. At the same time, youth must listen and implement the words of their elders carefully.