joie de l'écriture

Technology has engendered an endemic race of young adults labelled as the “GenX”, a race that has far surpassed the puerility that characterizes childhood. The Charles Darwin theory on the survival of the fittest was never so obvious than today. A whole generation is metamorphosed to the extent that yours truly, just a couple of years elder, feels like a living anachronism. Generation gap is no longer between kids and their parents. It is what surfaces between you, born in 1985, and your cousin, born in 1988. Like how a jeans-clad lady in a small town makes conservative women turn their heads followed by slurry of comments on the degradation of the Indian culture, a bunch of these mutants makes me stare at them obnoxiously while wondering if the world started spinning faster after 1985?

I symbolize the taxonomy that had the fortune of being born in an era when communication wasn’t equivalent to an SMS. When my best friend left for another town, I remember the exuberance of sending and receiving handwritten letters. And we did that till college. Then technology came into our life. I don’t remember going for a movie in a theatre when in school. I trust my memory. The definition of ‘hanging out’ as a kid was to go the public park, or play zany games in the backyard and in the teens to go out and ride bicycles with funny baskets on an open road. Those were the days when entertainment on the television sets comprised of ‘Small Wonder’ or ‘I dream of Jeanie’ and we were happy living in this fantasy world. Looking back, it somehow seems more real than today’s Reality TV shows that the new generation follows so religiously. Those were the days when party wear clothes did not mean a size ‘S’ of the latest Kareena Kapoor outfit. They just meant more frills or more laces. Those were the days when birthdays were celebrated at home, when friends cramped into every corner of your living room decorated with festoons of crepe paper and balloons, over bunny faced cakes and Monginis wafers singing the birthday song to have a good time. They weren’t about going and ringing the bell at Pizza Hut.

The generation is moving ahead, full throttle. Their age is grappling to keep pace with their maturity levels. These mavericks worship a new Lord. Some may dismiss it as the generation gap. In my humble opinion they are just putting the cart before the horse. It’s a perfect case of the tail wagging the dog. This race against time would only mean losing out on the little pleasures that you and me have experienced as children, the ones which we yearn to live all over again. It would be trying to reinvent the definition of childhood and teenage. And anyone who has lived these phases of life the way I have or anyone born in early eighties has, would be unconvinced of any progressive ideas of having fun lest they would taint it all. It’s true that the best years of life are realized only in hindsight.