The increase in crime by young people the world over signals the importance of changing attitudes towards the youth everywhere.
According to the WHO, "Worldwide, an estimated 1,76,000 homicides occur among young people between 15 and 29 years of age each year, making it the third leading cause of death in this age group." One in eight young people report sexual abuse.
There could be many reasons for the upsurge of youth crime. Drugs and alcohol, abject poverty, perceived injustices and inequalities, ill-treatment of the very young, and social conditions - all these could be major factors.
Another critical but often ignored factor is social interaction amongst the young and between them and their elders, particularly between parents and children, has virtually vanished. The digital age has caused deep societal divides, badly affecting the young.
As Catherine Steiner-Adair, celebrated author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, puts it, "Our children are growing up immersed in a culture where it is cool to be cruel, where media influences encourage it, and social networking facilitates it."
When I was young, school started early. After several hours in school, where we interacted with each other as children and teenagers, we returned home, took our cricket bats and balls, and went out to play with others of our age group and a few older men as well.
Some girls played with us, too. Others had their means of entertainment. The common point was that entertainment came through social interaction.
After cricket, I would go to our little front lawn in our small house in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, where my parents would be sitting. As it usually would be sweltering, my father would be bare-chested, with a wet towel thrown over his shoulders. We would speak and my father would talk about what transpired in his office, and stories from his past and current affairs.
After dinner, we would listen to the news over our ivory-coloured Bush radio. TVs and digital technology were miles away in the future.
This would seem unnatural to the modern-day youth, but the fact is from these talks with my parents and the reading I did to while away the afternoon hours on holidays, I gleaned a great deal of information. I had read all the P G Wodehouse books by 11, and a number of the classics including the gigantic Gone with the Wind by 18.
Today, I find the young mostly engrossed in their mobiles and laptops. The parents also spend their time looking at their mobiles and laptops. The beautiful, silken thread that bound the old and the young is now shredded at both ends.
The world, of course, has to progress. Digital technology has come to stay. Artificial intelligence will make deep inroads. But face-to-face interaction increasingly diminishes, bringing in its wake a whole host of problems affecting the mental health of the young.
As Sharda Yeole and Dr Mayura Sabne put it in a paper, “The digital landscape presents risks such as undue disclosure of personal data and information, cyberbullying, hate speech, financial abuse, digital addiction that impacts mental health, exposure to inappropriate content, information overload and misinformation, which the youth have to face as they are the majority users of digital technology."
In this context, I was delighted to come across a different kind of organisation for the youth, founded by a young man highly sensitive to the needs of the youth, taking them along a different path. This determined young man has established a network of 26,000 students in more than 220 cities. It covers not just India but 35 countries.
The young founder, Rishabh Shah, started it as a Model United Nations. Its name was changed on the advice of former President Pranab Mukherjee to India International Movement to Unite Nations (IIMUN).
The incredible fact is that it is run entirely by the youth, all 22 or less, making it the largest youth-run organisation in the world. The core council that runs it contains only young people of 22 or less.
They are open to advice from older people who have distinguished themselves in various spheres of life. Shashi Tharoor, Ajay Piramal, A R Rahman, Deepak Parekh, Jayant Sinha, P T Usha, Shabana Azmi, Boman Irani and Gen V P Malik are on the board of advisers. Their international advisory board includes leaders such as Chandrika Kumaratunga and Kevin Rudd. The academic advisory council, to which I was invited as an observer, is headed by former diplomat P S Raghavan. All powers to make decisions, however, vests in the core council.
The annual work programme of the IIMUN consists of three layers of events. First, there is a model United Nations conference at the school level. Inter-school MUN conferences follow this, and a championship national conference is finally held.
I attended the Chennai conference a couple of months ago and was immediately impressed by the volunteers' enthusiasm, energy, courtesy and humility. I was then invited to the national championship at Aamby Valley, where 3,000 young people congregated and heard the distinguished members of the board of advisers and famous international figures, who interacted with the students from the dais amidst many cultural programmes.
IIMUN has taken its members abroad too, to the UN building in New York and the British House of Commons, besides encouraging them to help in social causes. It introduces its members to future career options.
More than anything else, I was impressed with the values the volunteers displayed in abundant measure: courtesy, enthusiasm, respect and a desire to learn.
Rishabh Shah is well on his way to realise his conviction, expressed in his book, Nothing But The Truth, that "the real influencers of our country are not those who are trending on social media platforms, but the ones who are making things move across the country".
Creating a bridge between our very young and these movers and shakers is one of the most significant contributions anyone can make in present-day India.
(Views are personal)
(kmchandrasekhar@gmail.com)
K M Chandrasekhar | Former Cabinet Secretary and author of As Good as My Word: A Memoir