In the good old days when the world was young and the grass green in the meadows, there were just two of our kind ? Muggles and wizards. They didn’t particularly care for each other, but Harry Potter was still everyone’s darling. The Muggles loved his tales; the wizards loved to be in them. Yes, there were a Dudley and a Draco lurking round the corner, but by and large, people were just potty over Potter. Harry was in his first year at Hogwarts, and life back then ? it’s 1997 we’re talking about ? was much simpler in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Cut to 2005, and before you can say “Expelliarmus”, Harry is zooming back into your life today, riding piggyback on the sixth book of the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. His adolescent scowl is firmly in place and his trademark Firebolt broom leaves behind a trail of sparks in the face of this media glare. But, mind you, this is not Harry Potter, the boy wizard you saw back then. Harry Potter the Teen Phenomenon would be more like it.

Firstly, this Harry is not someone you, or even Snape, can kid around with. Even the great Albus Dumbledore, Order of Merlin, headmaster of Hogwarts etc., etc. got a taste of Harry’s newly-acquired temper towards the end of Order of the Phoenix. And if that was any indication, Harry has indeed blossomed into the perfect teenager ? getting angry at the drop of a hat, rowing with friends and generally frothing at the mouth at the slightest possible opportunity.

And when, pray, did this change take place? Some are blaming a lady called J.K. Rowling for it, but the truth is that all this anger had been building up inside him for some time now. Just as in a bad case of acne, it broke out suddenly after Harry’s schoolmate, Cedric, was killed by the evil dark wizard, Lord Voldemort. According to Rowling, one more character will kick the bucket in the new book and there is every chance Harry will strut and fret his hour upon the page for some more time to come ? whatever fans might have to say.

That is what the Great Debate is all about. Some think the change is quite all right, but many Pottermaniacs across the world and the Web are quite miffed about it. Florence Walker, an avid fan at 16, writes on a website: “Rowling’s efforts to make Harry an angry adolescent feel forced. I’m looking forward to Half-Blood Prince but I hope his teen tantrums are a thing of the past ? I’ve got enough angst of my own.”

But then, fans of Harry had every reason to feel let down by the last book ? after all, Harry’s charm was in his boy-next-door image. He was always the quintessential underdog ? a lonely orphan, bullied and neglected by his aunt’s family. He was also terribly lonely ? without any hope for friendship in this world. Or that’s what he thought for the first 10 years of his life.

So there he was, waiting to celebrate a bleak 11th birthday, when Hagrid came to whisk him away to Hogwarts. The reader, too, went with him ? as wide-eyed as Harry ? to walk into this magical world of the wizards. Harry’s childlike curiosity was something that rubbed off easily on his kid audience. Leafing through Harry Potter was infectious business, as many parents have found out to their peril, reading their kids to sleep with a volume of Harry’s adventures.

But there have been death-eaters and Dementors along the way, and for Harry, the transition from innocence to experience has been a troubled one. The jokes have become fewer. He is no more the prankster kid with a knack for the forbidden. In Book 3 he got his first glimpse of the menacing, adult world of wizards, when Sirius Black, his godfather, managed to flee from the wizard prison of Azkaban. Through Sirius, he got to know how exactly his parents had died.

Realising the truth of his terrible past set Harry apart even among his friends at Hogwarts. Thus, growing up has also been a process of exclusion for him ? he has come to accept that he will always be the odd one out. On the other hand, it has made him more focussed. There is more of an inner purpose in his actions now.

But then, Harry’s growing up has everything to do with the growing up of Rowling herself. When she was writing Philosopher’s Stone with an infant daughter in an Edinburgh caf? back in 1996, Rowling was a free-spirited single mother. All she wanted to do was tell her tale. But now as the fountainhead of Potter Inc. and the richest woman in Britain after the queen, she is a storytelling tycoon with a retinue of number-crunching associates to give her the latest profit-and-loss equations from around the globe. And here are some of them: Half-Blood Prince has seen Internet sales topping ?1 million; the sales figures of the Harry Potter books in 200 countries and 62 languages is pegged at ?265 million. And let’s not forget the films, which have together grossed ?1.3 million in the past few years.

So it’s imperative that since Rowling and Pottermania got children back to reading, the two of them should keep the kids glued to the pages with newer methods of holding their interest. Teenage angst is just one of those ways.

In the films, the actors have grown up from being awe-struck kids to confident stars who can hold their own in front of the camera. Every time a reader picks up a Harry Potter book, he’s always aware of the flitting images seen in a darkened movie hall ? and Rowling surely knows that.

Rowling has confirmed that there will be a “little romance” for Harry in the new book. Let’s hope there’s no anger to go with it, because a screaming Harry really sucks. But then Harry Potter was hardly meant to be Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.

who will rowling bump off?

Characters who might die in Book 6 and why:

• SEVERUS SNAPE: He’s a former death-eater. Now that Voldemort is back, there’s all the more reason for him to go after Snape

• REMUS LUPIN: He loves Harry and is one of his father’s friends

• HAGRID: Voldemort hates mixed-bloods

• ARTHUR WEASLEY: A Dumbledore supporter. He is part of the group that resists Voldemort in the last book.