S
o Mumbai’s best kept secret is not some nugget of Bollywood gossip but the knowledge that inside one of its most elite schools, 13-to 15-year-olds drank alcohol at a party. Tequila was smuggled in water bottles right under the noses of all the hi-tech security and CCTV cameras. I hope (fingers crossed) that you find this news disturbing. Not for the failure of CCTVs, but for our collective failure to educate children about sensible eating and drinking habits. Our kids have parents, families and family friends who “socially drink” and thereby make it aspirational and acceptable. The fact that an adolescent’s limbic areas of the brain, related to risk-taking, are better developed than the frontal lobe, which corresponds to responsibility, reasoning power and impulse control, never crosses our so-called mature and self-regulated, social drinking mind.