Bieber Mania

The other day, I caught a few of my boys defacing one of the long wooden tables that serve as desks at JM. I was about to get mad and levy some kind of consequence, but when I saw what they had written in chalk on the dark wood, I could not help but laugh.

JUSTIN BIEBER, their graffiti shouted in neat capitalized script, spanning a two-foot length of tabletop. I rolled my eyes and gestured for them to erase it. Since it was in chalk, it was easily wiped away. As I turned around, though, I could still see the faint whitish outline of the name imprinted on the wood: JUSTIN BIEBER, like the dying scroll of some haunted spirit.

Justin Bieber? What the hell? I thought to myself as I tried to get back to teaching.

This was not my first encounter with Bieber Mania in Tirur or in other parts of India, for that matter. Back in September, when Jenna and I were in Darjeeling for a short vacation after our ATI training in Kolkata, we got up before dawn one morning to see the sun rise over Mt. Kanchendzonga. It required a bumpy thirty-minute ride in a jeep to the outskirts of the city. The jeep we hired was driven by a young man who looked to be no older than 20. As we hit Darjeeling’s main road in the pre-dawn gloom, this driver popped in a CD and turned up his jeep’s stereo system. It began blaring Justin Bieber music at a volume I thought sufficient to wake up everyone in the houses we passed.

I had not heard much Justin Bieber before then, only snippets on American radio or briefly on MTV. Either way, I was not prepared to get more acquainted with his music at 4:30 in the morning on a twisting, pothole-filled road in northern India. At the time, I had mistaken this encounter as this one driver’s odd predilection for one particularly odd American musical phenomenon.

Yet, as I have come to discover in Tirur, there is something about Justin Bieber.

On our first day at JM, we did a ‘get-to-know-you’ activity. We asked students to draw several pictures and write some words on one page relating to their families, their interests, their friends, and other things of that nature. One part of the activity asked students to write a name of someone important in their lives. Most students wrote the names of a parent or a brother or sister. Some, in this heavily Muslim school, wrote the name of Allah. Others, boys quite predictably, wrote names of famous international football stars—Kaká, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi. A few of the girls wrote the name of famous Indian singers. However, enough boys—and it was exclusively boys who did this—wrote Justin Bieber, that I had to take it as more than just coincidence.

“Justin Bieber?” I said to the first boy I witnessed write his name.

“Yes!” he replied excitedly. “You like…Bieber?”

“Uhhh…not really,” I said confusedly.

He gave me a downcast look, as if I had just told him I did not think puppies were cute. To compound my confusion, this boy was in a 9^th standard class, meaning he was probably 14 or 15 years old. I thought back to the students I had taught at Hogg, most of whom were 13 or 14. If any of those boys had pronounced a liking—or even a cursory knowledge—of Justin Bieber, they would have been beaten up.

I cannot say Indian boys’ fascination with Justin Bieber is wrong-headed though. Catching kids writing his name on their desk, after all, is much more preferable to finding a message like “F@%& Tha Popo!”, which happened quite often at Hogg.

Yet, with only a glancing knowledge of Justin Bieber’s music, I think I have a small grasp on why he is so popular here. Justin Bieber is, of course, innocence defined. He is a boy whose voice has not yet cracked singing about things like stealing kisses underneath the bleachers and holding hands in the hallway on the way to lunch. In other words, kid stuff.

It is this longing for innocence, I think, that has made Justin Bieber such a phenomenon among teenage girls in America. And I think it is a version of the same quality that has made him so popular among teenage boys in India. After all, true adulthood starts much earlier here in India than it does for kids in America. Kids here are asked to start doing adult-like things at a very young age—buy groceries, walk their siblings to school, do household chores. And more life-altering things too: many students begin focusing on a career path when they are 16. And a not-too-insubstantial number of students have arranged marriages very soon after graduation, when they are barely yet 18.

In this context, a liking for Justin Bieber is not so much the superficial preference for a soprano-voiced, doe-eyed pop sensation. It is a yearning, instead, for an adolescence that many of these Indian students will never truly have, a teenage world for their fantasies and dreams. Because, in reality, they will be getting jobs and having their parents arrange their marriages by the time most American teenagers are picking out mini-fridges for their college dorm rooms.

At JM, as at any school in the world, there is graffiti. Above the boys’ restroom, you will find the names of football heroes scrawled quickly and messily. And at other random points, in the most unexpected of places, you will see a name that, at first glance, defies logic. But the sheer frequency with which it appears belies something deeper in the psyche of students at JM, a mania to which many parents of teenage girls in America could relate.

JUSTIN BIEBER.