IT MAY SEEM ODD, probably because we don’t give it much thought. But these days, it’s coolness that people pursue, perhaps, in certain ways, much more than happiness. The pursuit of coolness has always been a top priority in the lines of most teens. They spend significant time in doing stuff they think is really ‘cool’ or ‘in’. A lot is being said on what is not cool or what is no longer in trend. But what does being ‘cool’ mean actually? Rather what does it take to become ‘cool’?

Ask a bunch of teenagers — either everyone comes up with a different answer or generally they tend to go blank. Everyone has this preconceived notion about coolness. And where from did the notion develop? No one knows that and frankly, no one actually cares.

So, here is an attempt to decipher what it takes to be genuinely ‘cool’ while bursting through its unrealistic definitions. Well, we are ‘cool’ to at least give it a try.

We usually come across two kinds of cool — the first is how you are perceived by people. This kind of coolness is what is mostly present in youth today. If you want to be this sort then you have to follow only three mantras. First, you have to be a ‘branded’ person — branded clothes, branded gear, branded watches, et al. So it is definitely ‘uncool’ to come up with something which is ordinary — if you do so, you will be the lesser mortal in the sea of cool people. Second, you have to possess some gadgets — latest cells (camera is the minimum requirement), i-pods, MP4s. It hardly matters whether you understand music or not. To all this, add a few more traits, like carrying all sorts of weird hair styles, walking with a lazy gait — pretending to be the most oblivious person in the world and so here comes the third mantra — creating the mystery. You need to have some secret and hard to attain knowledge that can be shared only with one’s peers as a valuable drop of trivia to be used in their own quest of coolness.

However, we also have a second kind of ‘cool’ — this points towards positive actions as a priority. These are what the ‘first’ kind would call total ‘freaks’. These are youngsters who love reading, discussing politics and developmental issues. Then the ‘first’ kind thinks that you have some disease!

Well, the time is changing definitely. By setting one’s caps at this ‘first’ breed of cool people one will gradually lose their understanding of the bigger picture and will drown oneself in the increasingly shallow pool of the approved way of doing things. Despite their attempts to be ‘hip and happening’ — different from the rest — they are just following the crowd and losing their individuality.

The present society is truly dual in nature — with some trying to scale different heights of coolness and a few others totally influenced by the ‘first’ kind because they are genuinely ‘cool’. The future seems uncertain — we might end up with either all ‘supposedly’ cool people or with ones who are naturally so.

Devastuti Sarma/Plabita Talukdar