Screened Adolescence
reflecting on how the proliferation of western media has helped me grow up.
Growing up in a strict family, Western media was not just an entertainment for me; it has been a survival toolkit for me and my brother. Among the shows I secretly watched, the coming-of-age genre did what no adults in my life could: it showed me how to grow up. Not through lectures, but through characters who failed, chose and changed. For a 2000s kid of Bangladesh like me, every CD was a portal.
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2000s kids know the sparkle of discs, that rainbow shine that promised a new world. After school, I sneaked to the CD store with my brother with the tiffin money saved from the whole week. We hid the treasure in our bags, hearts racing, and walked home like criminals. In the afternoon, when Abbu is not home, we were free to escape to the fictional world and travelled to Hogwarts of Harry Potter, to the four nations of The Last Airbender, to Mr. Miyagi’s Dojo of The Karate Kid.
Harry Potter made me dream of a school where friendship was magic and bravery was rewarded. I wanted a Hermione who would drag me to libraries, a Ron who would make me laugh at hard times. The next year, I got into cadet college. At first, it felt like the opposite of Hogwarts, in place of spells and wands there were commands and rules, in place of moving staircase there was long roads we had to run and cross in minutes. But soon it became more than a magical world, because the way we took care of each other was magic, the sports felt no less than Quidditch or Triwizard Tournament.
In the chats of movie nerds in college, I took the experiences of the movies I watched during vacation and we could connect with each other. When there was barely any program for teenagers in Bangladesh, Western media filled the gap for us. Sci-fi shows like Stranger Things gave me something more: scientific wonder and I took it to college to gossip with friends, to conduct failed
experiment with chemicals in lab class. The flickering lights, the upside-down world, the kids who refused to give up on each other, it all amazed me. I started asking ‘why’ more. I started noticing details. Those shows didn’t just entertain me. They trained my brain to question, to connect, to never accept the surface.
But there is a downside too. In all these years I have watched many more: Little women, Zootopia, The Fifth Wave, Mona Lisa Smile. These fictional worlds made me too idealistic. The real world is harsher, quieter, less magical. For years that disappointed me. But now I am learning and many
times when I feel frustrated, I remind myself of the determination I saw in Judy of Zootopia, the resilience in Zuko of The Last Airbender or the strength in Jo of Little Women, to keep moving because my story has not ended yet.
