All the reasons why

I have been struggling to connect with a Netflix show that seems to have caught the imagination of millennials and the post millennials — 13 Reasons Why. The show, now it its second season, deals with teenage sex, bullying, stalking, body-shaming, misogyny, abuse, drugs, suicide, depression, etc. 

A woman in her 20s told me that she relates to many of the themes that occur in the life of American high-schoolers. There are heated debates on the internet about episodes that tackle gun violence and sex. 

And while the storytelling, in my opinion, is often rather tiresome, it does bring back memories of a certain incident involving school kids in DPS Delhi. There was no ‘social media’ at that time, but the MMS was the new beast in virtual town. And no one — whether it was a Riya Sen or a school kid — was spared.

The infamous scandal took place in 2004. While there was nothing new about teenagers getting naughty, what did make everyone sit up and take note was the fact that it was allegedly a consensual act filmed with the intention of auctioning it online. The ingenuity was stunning, and also an indication of what lay in store for tech and sex hungry Indians.

In the Netflix show, teenagers often make out wherever they can. Sometimes it is consensual; sometimes it is not. There are also issues of sexual orientation. What gives the encounters a sinister turn is the brazenness with which the kids document and share some of these moments. 

This is not new. Neither is it peculiar to the Americans. Remember, we are the country that shoots gang-rapes on our smart phones and circulates them for fun. We are also the nation that searches for videos of a child being raped as soon as we find out about it.

So yes, 13 Reasons Why may make sense to a lot of people. And perhaps I need to be a little more forgiving about the storytelling – that is a lot of pop psychology and mumbo jumbo about the butterfly effect and what not. But its heart is perhaps in the right place. 

Especially when it tries to talk about collateral damages. “There is nothing that happened to Hannah that has never happened to any high school kid before,” says one of the characters when confronted about the mental torture and physical abuse that the key character has had to suffer. For all its candy floss treatment of some rather grave issues, it was a line that really bothered me.

We go through our lives thinking exactly the same way – that there is nothing unusual about what we accept as routine in our high school, college life perhaps. Or even on campuses. The bullying, the sexist barbs, the misogyny, teasing, some Bollywood-style stalking that we seem to take in our stride all the time. Even mental and physical abuse by our partners. 

I wonder if we are all waiting for something worse to happen before we decided that enough is enough? But who defines what is worse for us?

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