Delving into observation home dynamics

The 17-year-old boy, who killed a young man and woman when he crashed his Porsche into their bike, on Pune's midnight streets last weekend, has been kept at the Nehru Udyog Kendra Observation Home in the city for two weeks.

Here he will eat, pray, play and sleep with the other boys of the home, which can accommodate up to a hundred boys between the ages of 14 and 18. All of them will also be subject to counselling sessions by psychologists and psychiatrists.

The similarity of routine, however, is more than offset by the dissimilarity in the profiles of the other boys on the one hand, and the juvenile on the other.

Without exception, the other 99 inmates of the home would be destitute boys, orphans in all probability, picked up from the streets for petty and not-sopetty offences. For them, seeing the son of a prominent realtor in their midst would be too in-your-face and difficult to handle. It would give them goosebumps. That a boy of their age can incur a bill of ₹48,000 in pubs on a single night, drive, at 200 kilometres per hour in the dead of night, a Porsche costing 2.5 crore without a license (and a license plate), kill people, and get away with it, is stuff they would only have seen in Bollywood films.

Seeing such a figure among them can cause them to go berserk. Even adults would find this difficult to cope with, let alone boys at the impressionable ages of 14 to 18.

What this would trigger in the boys isn't hard to foresee. Already accustomed to a life of crime, which is why they are in the observation home in the first place, it would lead to a variety of behaviours ranging from violence to robbery to sodomy. Their victim would obviously be the boy who is their exotic other, the bade baap ka beta, the juvenile in this case.