With the school year almost over, I'm looking forward to weeks and weeks of mall jaunts and parties. With the arrival of summer, though, I have been thinking more than ever about how safe we really are as teenagers. My parents would no doubt scoff at the idea of me thinking about anything deeper than what the next meal is likely to be but I have given this quite a bit of thought. I have come to the conclusion that for all our blasé attitude and appetite for trouble, we teenagers do actually care about things such as getting picked up by strangers or being taken advantage of. It's just that some of us aren't too good at listening to our consciences, mostly because we think we suspiciously sound like teachers delivering yet another lecture about something we already know.
I am the sort of person who usually switches off her phone when I am out so Mum won't call at inappropriate moments. But recently, I have started thinking differently. This is because, for the past few weeks, our sole topic of conversation on Facebook has been about a friend of ours in the UK, meeting a supposedly wonderful person. This friend claims that she has finally found her "one true love", which is all very well, except for the fact that she is 15 and her new "friend" is 29.
"He's so hot," she writes. "And I don't even have to worry about stuff like immaturity. He's so much more mature than the guys you get in school." In the course of a few days, he has chatted her up at a supermarket, taken her for a walk and told her exactly how beautiful he thinks she is. She may not have to worry about immaturity, but there are a whole host of other problems she needs to seriously start considering.
It seems, however, that it's just me who thinks this is a dodgy business. Everyone else is happy for this girl and eagerly awaits further updates on the developing relationship. They hang around their computers, logged on to Facebook, in expectation of more gossip to dissect. "He asked me if I want to watch a movie with him!" we were informed excitedly. "Just us two! How romantic is that?" My dark mutterings of: "Well, don't blame me if you end up dead on the sidewalk or he ends up in jail, and you have regrets about this for the rest of your life," were attributed to my generally pessimistic view on life.
But I think it's high time that we teenagers realised the difference between dating and becoming involved with someone more than twice our age, and took more account of our personal safety in general. Having said that, there is a difference between being a wise person who only sounds like a parent because she disapproves of something, and a parent who is always going to disapprove, whatever you do.
This is particularly true of my parents, who are strongly opposed to my suggestion that they teach me the basics of driving, even if it is only within the compound. (Apparently this is against the law anyway.) As well as the little matter of my hand-eye co-ordination (almost certain to put me in hospital if I was let loose in the driving seat). Mum was also quick to remind me of an incident in my Delhi neighbourhood where a 13-year-old boy we knew backed his dad's car into another vehicle. He was in hospital for six months and had to miss a school year.
I suppose teenagers will always be wild at heart and a little reckless sometimes, but I can't help but wish that we would not endanger ourselves in the process. My intelligent (I thought) repsonse to my mum's reaction to the driving idea was that I was only adhering to her own unbelievably embarrassing motto: "Try something new! Break the rules!" But her response in turn was: "You can do that in other ways! Why don't you take up the trumpet again? You can make all the noise you like!" So my mum's idea of breaking the rules is taking up the trumpet again. What are you supposed to say to that?
Lavanya Malhotra is a 14-year-old student in Dubai
