Identity Issues?

Earlier this evening, I saw a guy with brightly-coloured streaked hair walk by my dad and me in the mall. As in India, streaked hair is still an uncommon sight, it caught our attention.

“Look at his hair,” my dad said. “What need is there to colour one’s hair? It’s understandable if you colour it when you grow old – although, I still haven’t done it because for me, looks don’t matter. One should age gracefully.” I nodded along to show that I was paying attention to what he was saying.

“But these young people,” he started off in his previous (and most favourite) vein. “Everybody wants to look cool, everybody wants to look different. Why these people have so much identity crisis, I don’t understand.”

I immediately rooted for the poor teenager who’d walked past us not five minutes ago and didn’t even know that somebody was ill-talking about his choice of hair colour. “These days, people are very artistic and they take a stand for things. They denote their difference in opinions—”

“Being artistic is fine. But attracting unnecessary attention is not. If you do good work, people are going to recognize you. You don’t need to look like a parrot or walk in slim-fitting clothes. You…”

I tuned out of the conversation since I knew how it would go on. Instead, I began to wonder. Is today’s generation really just a show-off? Do we really care so much about shallow things like our looks and the number of relationships we have?

Being a musician myself, I sometimes wish to colour my hair, because I think it goes with the image of the band and all that. But is that the real reason behind my wanting to colour my hair or not? I mean, am I subconsciously looking for ways to attract attention to myself? Despite of how I think I’m so mature, am I, in fact, a very shallow person?

I don’t have any answers.