To be young and well fed !

Mylapore ,at the heart of Chennai is nearly 2000 years old but the current inhabitants of this sprawling metropolis are mostly young.

But it is ruled by middleagers who'd rather take a nap in the noon after an early morning walk at the beach from where youngsters of low income and poor families fed sumptuously on rice available at Re 1 at ration shops, would like to let out their energy by hitting a ball and running after it , where youngsters from middle class families would like to empty their minds crammed with pages upon pages of text books by taking a swing at the ball too, and crowd the Marina beach in droves ,have been shooed off by the rulers to make space for walkers.

If they land on playgrounds they are turned away by all the digging going on ,huge pits and trenches awaiting the construction of parking lots to accommodate,who else but middleaged and old shoppers four wheelers.

If they want to express their first stirrings of romantic feelings , they have no cover as all the parks are tonsured of their greenery and are smooth as a vultures bald head !

If the kids living in flats skip down to the common place to play they disturb the siesta of the ground floor owners who act as petty despots and forbid them of their natural birth rights . The grounds in their schools are all pocket sized hanky's fit only to play hopscotch and marbles!

Are the youngsters from the slums dissipating their energy on one another?There seem to be a spate of murders,gang wars as well as chain snatching and burglaries. Are the eve teasers on the increase as this is the only way they can get near the eve's?

Are the pubs overflowing because the middle class youth have nowhere to let off steam?

Are all those cute chubby kids actually obese as they have no other go but watch the T.V and become couch potato's?

The rulers do everything in their authority to put a lid on the bubbling youthful spirit and then cry foul at their not winning medals in sports or ring the alarm bell at increasing crime rate or lament at the early onset of diabetes and heart diseases in youth.

There is a old saying ''To be poor is cruel .To be young and poor is crueler''.

The new saying is ''To be well fed and young in Chennai is most cruel ''!