"I am a virgin. But I know everything about everything," Mimi, a 15-year-old Bangalore girl, flips her ponytail, looking around to make sure all eyes are on her. "Everyone I know has touched first base, at least." That's "kissing and necking", she explains to her parents. Notes are regularly exchanged between girls after sexual encounters and discarded i-Pill packs are often found in the bathrooms of the posh convent she studies in. "I'm sure you won't remain a virgin by the time you turn 18," her mother interjects tearfully. "Dude, will you let me finish," Mimi rebukes. "I'm not stupid enough to get into trouble."Trouble is the one certain truth about her: she is a teenager. A face among the nation's 250 million adolescents- the world's largest. But how well does the nation know her? Not enough, going by the furore over the new Protection of Children From Sexual Offences Bill, 2010 proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development ("Does it mean 12-year-olds will start having sex?"). But now a host of surveys is figuring out what it means to be a teenager: they pack in 38 hours of activities into a day- work, chat, browse, talk, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, smoke, drink, splurge, do drugs, have sex, get pregnant-and they can't wait for the future to arrive. Unknown to the nation at large, teenage seems to have taken on a whole new meaning. To Delhibased counsellor Gitanjali Kapoor, it's a cultural moment: "Constant exposure of different types of media is enhancing their inquisitiveness, encouraging them to question and stretch their boundaries."