Are you a teen in India? If you are, you must know how tricky it can be. Between overly worried parents, snoopy teachers and all sorts of aunties and uncles, our lives centre around keeping their interfering noses out of our business. Sadly, that usually doesn't work. They somehow manage to find their way in and shower us with their 'blessings'.
First come the overly worried parents. My parents worried more than I ever did about my exams or anything else for that matter. "If you don't get marks, you won't be able to get into a good college. If you don't get into a good college, you will not be able to find a job. If you do not find a job, no one will marry you. You will end up lonely and poor". In other words, if I do not study for my unit test, I'll be broke, unmarried and will die a virgin. At the same time, dating is off the table. "It will distract you from your studies, and then you will get horrible marks. Then you won't get a good college...." . Of course there are exceptions. Some parents are really practical. They know that getting marks in school has very little to do with getting married or finding a job. I call these the 'dream parents' :D
Next in line, after your parents are the snoopy teachers, who REALLY need to get a life! If you are not an Indian teenager, let me tell you who Indian teachers usually are. To generalize, they are a bunch of bored housewives, who one day get out of bed and say "Oh! Let's become a teacher!". And voila! Before they know it, they're sitting in the staff room, gossiping about students and eating all the canteen food. These women have an uncanny ability to detect what is going on in our personal lives and I don't mean that in a good way. Their stalker-ish tendencies would make them excellent spies. The Indian Intelligence could really use them. But again, there are exceptions. There are some teachers who you can call real professionals. They know what they're talking about when they teach us and they do not come to school just to find more people to gossip about.
The last, (and least) are the aunties. These are fat, 40-something housewives who watch Ekta Kapur serials all day. Between their daily schedule of watching TV, they also find the time to give free advice to their friends, their friend's kids, their relatives, their relative's kids, their neighbours, their neighbour's kids and other random people they don't know. And usually, they also do a great deal of research in trying to figure out the public's opinion on a particular 'problem'. If a girl is seen walking alone with a boy, the entire locality will have come to a general consensus about their love story by the end of the day. The girl's parents would have received hundreds (okay, maybe not hundreds) of calls and the girl will have aunties coming up to her and giving her long philosophical lectures on 'preserving' herself until marriage. For all you know, they could have been cousins! And when it comes to aunties, there are absolutely no exceptions.
If you are a teen in India, and you are nodding your head while reading this, you are at the right place. There are millions of us who feel the same way and yet, can't do much about it. This blog is a way of telling these overly caring people to not care so much. As young adults, we do not need to be told every second of every day how to run our lives. If you feel the same way, hit the facebook like button and leave a comment below, so that I know that there are others out there who agree and wish that all these people would just stop giving a shit.
