Are We Raising a Generation That Sees Brutality as Entertainment?

In Ahmedabad, a fifteen-year-old boy stabbed his classmate. But what unsettles more than the knife itself are the words that came before it, a stream of casual texts where he toyed with the idea of violence like it was nothing. Not a moment of madness, not a crime of desperation, but a rehearsal. The stabbing wasn’t an explosion. It was a performance staged, narrated, almost flaunted. That is the horror: not just that a boy was killed, but that he felt nothing strange about imagining it, announcing it, and then following through.

To anchor that abstract horror in reality: the victim was a Class 10 student at Seventh-Day Adventist Higher Secondary School. The altercation that led to the stabbing had begun a week earlier on the school staircase. After being injured, the boy returned to campus but lay untreated for nearly thirty minutes before any medical aid arrived. Authorities recovered WhatsApp messages in which the attacker admitted the act and later shrugged off the possibility of death with an indifferent “What has happened has happened.”

India’s youth are slipping into a chilling new normal where brutality is no longer shocking, but ambient. Violence doesn’t hide in the shadows anymore; it sits on the school bench, passes through WhatsApp groups, gets wrapped into memes, and scrolls past on reels. A slap in a corridor filmed for likes. A fistfight uploaded with laughing emojis. A boy pulling a knife, not in panic, but because he knows someone will record it. We used to say “kids will be kids” when they teased or fought. But now, what does it mean when kids rehearse murder?

Culture is complicit. Television paints cruelty as texture, where humiliation, peer violence, and nihilism are the currency of belonging. These aren’t stories consumed at arm’s length; they seep into the bloodstream. Teenagers repeat the dialogues, mimic the gestures, and metabolize the worldview: that pain is entertainment, and dominance is the only real power. What was once fiction bleeds into daily life. Watch any TikTok clone and you’ll see knives aestheticized, gang fights romanticized, abuse choreographed as though it were dance.

What we saw in Ahmedabad is part of this bleed. We saw the texts that followed the stabbing, carrying not horror, but indifference. We saw delay when help was needed. We saw social media jump in — not to mourn, but to sensationalize. We saw the school under fire, parents in protest, authorities raising questions about negligence. Schools responded, some tightening security, introducing stricter discipline and checking bags, bringing in counselling and mental health support. These measures are necessary, but in many cases they come after tragedy, not before. They are reactions, not safeguards.

The collapse of empathy follows. The scaffolding that once held our moral outrage together is eroding. When classmates don’t flinch at threats, when peers cheer instead of intervene, when silence follows instead of horror then cruelty becomes language. Violence stops being the rupture in society; it becomes its grammar.

The numbers tell the same story. NCRB data shows a worrying uptick in violent crimes committed by juveniles over the last decade, from assaults to sexual violence to murder. These are not isolated explosions but part of a rising arc, the normalization of brutality as an everyday possibility. And unlike older generations, today’s violence is increasingly performative not hidden, but broadcast. What used to be whispered about in shame is now curated for likes, a digital footprint of savagery proudly left behind.

The danger is not only in what they do, but in what they feel or rather, what they no longer feel. Indifference is the most terrifying element here. The boy in Ahmedabad wasn’t raging, wasn’t trembling with uncontrollable emotion. He was clinical. Detached. Violence wasn’t the end of his rope; it was just an option. That should freeze every parent, teacher, and policymaker in this country. Because when violence feels casual, society is already broken.

We’ve seen this arc play out across the world. Columbine in the U.S. began in locker-room cruelties, Japan’s subcultures incubated alienated young men obsessed with dark fantasies, Brazil’s gangs turned urban poverty into spectacles of power. Every time, it began the same way: with society brushing off youth cruelty as “just a phase.” Every time, the consequences were irreversible.

The stabbing in Ahmedabad is not an isolated crack in the wall. It is the sound of the foundation groaning. If we don’t confront it, we will raise citizens for whom brutality is not crime but conversation, not deviation but default. That should terrify us, because it means the future we are walking into is one where empathy is extinct, and cruelty is currency.

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