Kidults, rejuveniles, twixters and adultescents—the new species now straddle the consumer bandwagon.

Kids in expensive public schools have their middle class guardians spend hard-earned money on expensive portfolios, so that they can become phenomenal wage earners, helping the family to catapult itself into the precincts of the rich and the beautiful. Meanwhile the market is emitting aggressive signals to aspiring parents that if they have a kid, they need to market him or her or whatever is saleable in the kid's profile. Let the kid create a cash flow into your coffers, is the message.

Times are a changing, and with that, values for the middle class, who still carry vestiges from the times of the Mahabharta, when the household (read family) was the central pillar of society and the child the light of the universe. You mated, worked and accumulated so that you could invest in the future of your child. This ethos still runs strong in the collective subconscious of the Indian middle class, or rather it did, till the other day. Now it is showing a shift that may as well end up standing all this on its head. With adults joining the league of the perennial adolescents by getting into a 'fix it frenzy', gone are the days when growing old gracefully was an art much practiced by the middle aged, middle class Indians.

When a friend of mine, in a recent sharing of views on cosmetic surgery, said: 'I am going to get everything done... I always want to remain 16'—it took me aback a little, because I had thought that this very successful, beautiful woman, with her hands full of very meaningful work and surrounded by a loving family, enjoyed being mature and in control of her life, every which way.

There was a time, not so long ago, when people looked forward to adulthood, assumption of responsibility, control over their lives, because that was where the boost to one's worldly stature and status rested and because that is how the economics behind it all worked.

Now kids are assuming the role of wage earners with a vengeance, and are making money in quantities undreamt of, by their elders. Salaries of young employees are peaking in phenomenal ways and smashing bygone standards.

The kids are trying hard to experience adulthood earlier than ever, even while adults are trying their damnedest to stay young, if not forever, then for as long as it takes.

The question is: 'What is all this doing to our markets???

Take a look around and a plethora of 'fix clinics', new-age gyms, fat burning stations, spas, health clinics, yoga centres, (all showing a way out of age-related aberrations, promising a bodiliscious body) are sprouting all around, as are pubs, bars, discotheques and other young joints.

The 'nip-tuck' industry as it is called, cuts, scrapes, rejuvenates, enhances, fills or sucks out, or does whatever it takes to give one a new 'make-over' at a price and the side effects be damned.

The drugs and the cosmetics markets are bursting with pills, creams, therapies, hormone replacement options. The fashion industry has truly blurred all boundaries and East and West meet here as effortlessly as elsewhere.	Dr.Roopa Vajpeyi Hony.Editor
Call it the emergence of a post modern or a post globalised world with a new market scenario... its happening here in our sparkling India...