I find a lot of young people need a helpline to deal with their maturing feelings of wanting, in failing to get what they want, they wallow in a low and after a few serious bouts of non-performance ornon-achievement, believe they're burnt out. This tailspins them into depression.

Who am I? What am I doing? Where do I belong? Who are my friends? Are all trigger questions that can get one melancholic and low, coupled to a few of life's inevitable reverses and Presto! You become `shrink' material. In Bombay and Delhi, urbanisation has reached the standards of the debauched West, yet that institution of American sanity, the shrink or psychotherapist, is conspicuous by it's near absence. Sure, major hospitals have psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, but they're only for the seriously ill or mentally challenged.

When I look at cities like Bombay or Delhi and the people around, I realise a lot of people are coping, just barely making it. The nuclear family has isolated the family unit and once the children grow to adolescence more serious cracks appear in a lot of marital relationships -- problems which were glossed over earlier for the sake of the children, rear their ugly heads, a time bomb starts totick.

After perhaps twenty years or more of cohabitation, adult men and women could feel their spouses have become aliens. They communicate only when necessary, are minimally courteous and every petty quarrel acquires Kargil proportions. They stop telling each other their innermost thoughts and feelings but start confiding in someone else. What starts as a need to talk could easily escalate to a full-blown affair. If this affair comes out in the open, even by accident, then all hell breaks loose. In the marital home names are traded, foul language and behaviour become the order of the day and perhaps, eventually, peace is bought once the threat has passed. But at what cost?

Adultery is as old as the hills it figures in the scriptures but our attitude to it is still archaic. In India, adultery is rarely the cause of a divorce, as the person has little or no self-esteem left, let alone the wherewithal to leave. Marriages rarely break up on grounds of adultery in India but then the marriage itself pays theprice, with the phantom menace threatening to recur. `If you've done it once you will again' being the logic. Trust and respect having taken a beating. The betrayed person has to swallow their hurt and pride and accept the erring spouse back, but extracts their pound of flesh eventually.

A man or woman who has been ditched by their loved one feels even more remorse and pain and a self-fulfilling chain of depression and self pity take over. Young teenagers who've been dumped could get suicidal if they don't have a friend to walk and talk them through their pain. The blues can kill. The other problems of the post-college, pre-life lot are unwanted pregnancies, unemployment and a feeling of low self worth, any or all of these could saddle the brain to the point of `I give up'. Peer pressure to be slim, look good, dress well and keeping up with the Jones' could cause feelings of negative self worth right through the social spectrum. Many self-conscious women resort to chemical diet pills which they know verylittle about, to keep their hour glass figures.

As most of these pills attack the CNS, or central nervous system, these ladies hook themselves on to an addiction which drives them to neurotic behaviour, which, after a period of time, could lead to severe mental imbalance. Ten years of staying on these miracle pills is all it takes to qualify for the loony bin. Is it worth it then to be anorexically thin no man ever likes a woman that thin only to get sick and never recover mentally? Why do so many people enjoy self-destructing like this? Why don't we watchdog or police the people around us to ensure that they don't have habits that don't just kill but take one's sanity away. Smoking and drinking in moderation is socially acceptable, or so they say, but if any of these pill brigade dare to have a drink they will explode, literally! Their behaviour will be extremely extreme and it is the harbinger of truth, which most choose to ignore.

The young and old in the city need to network into a group offriends and family and talk their problems through with them. We need counsellors to man help-lines and be available for anyone who is unable to cope. We need shelters for abandoned women, children and even men. Society has to learn to become more caring, less selfish more sharing, more loving. Bombay is a great city that is drowning in a lot but it shouldn't be in the tears of her children. Let us try, all of us, to make an effort and try to listen and even help someone in need. If we do, we will be rained with blessings from above, as it will be a fitting tribute to the God in each one of us. Let there be more happiness and laughter in our lives, let's live life caringly.