Maybe this may come across as a bit juvenile but I
nevertheless feel the need to write about it. My generation , the 20 something
crowd were born at a particularly wrong period of time. We were born at the
brink of the IT explosion and the end of an era where basic needs were
difficult to come by. We did not experience the Indira Gandhi emergency , nor
any weird superstitious beliefs and customs followed by our parents in their
generation.We experienced say a bit of both the worlds , a time when telephone
connections took literally years to come by and the cell phone explosion. The
evolution of the desk top to the lap top. We've seen it all. From waiting for
our relatives settled abroad to get us 'foreign gifts' to just hopping to the
nearest shopping mall and getting any foreign brand of our choice. The awe
which a 'foreign returned' held about 10 years ago is now laughable. Our
parents and those of that generation are also seeing these transitions but see
it with different eyes. They do not feel the urge or the necessity to adapt to
them. 'We have gone through all this.' they say patronizingly , 'been there and
done that'. Try explaining them the coolness of a smart phone and the
possibilities which an android phone opens up to you and they stare at you blankly.
"Nokia phones are the best' they say stoutly , looking fondly at their
million year old basic nokia phones with the exasperatingly hard key buttons.
Now the real question is , are we a soft generation? Have we really had things
coming easy for us? I agree that most of us have not seen the struggle of the basic
‘roti , kapda aur makaan’ but can our struggles and battles be compared to
theirs? ‘Your cousin is earning Rs 30,000 per month and wears new shirts
everyday’ my grandmother tells me with a wide eyed look. I look at her and
sigh. Earning a living is really not one of our struggles today. A graduate an
engineering , commerce or an arts graduate in their mid 20s will be earning a
decent pay packet( I am not including our medicos and denticos , we all know
that earning starts quite late for them considering their never ending
studies.) The struggle for us is to keep up with the competition , to not
disappear in a sea of faceless graduates but to stand out amongst them. To be
different(however cliché that sounds) , for being different amongst our peers
is not a possibility but a must for us. How else will we attract the thousands
of companies and other establishments to pick us instead of our peers. While
our parents discuss about the escalating prices of rice and groan at the time
when 1kg of rice was Re 1 , we happily go about splashing Rs 1000 per movie or
any other outing (this includes travel , food , ticket prices , etc.) Do we
have a choice? We choose to live any cheaper , we practically will have a non
existant social life. WE have to keep pace with everything happening around us,
cannot afford to sit back and dwell. WE see some of our classmates losing their
lives due to drunken driving , committing suicides for the silliest of reasons
and living recklessly without a care for their lives. They last in our minds
for 2 days and we move on. WE have no choice, cannot really dwell on them.
Share it with your parents and they say ‘how silly , imagine committing suicide
for something like that.’ Sure these kids did not die of any heart attack or any
other bodily dysfunction but don’t they merit the same compassion which some 50
something somebody gets when they die? For God’s sake our lives are just
starting. We live in an era when a tweet can make you famous and a facebook
comment can get you arrested. We are connected to 500 virtual friends on
facebook and chat with 20 odd people on whatsapp and YET feel lonesome at
times. So the real question is Are we a soft generation? My answer is NO. We
are bloody tough !! Yeah ok we do not struggle for roti kapda and makaan(though
I do not know so much about makaan considering the ever escalating real estate
prices.) But we have every day battles. Our foes are not some unknown faces in
some cabin in the office but our peers , even our so called friends. We walk
out of our houses everyday fully aware of the fact that there can be a blast at
any time in any place in OUR city and we can be ripped to shreds. We come home
late at night fully aware of the thousands of potential rapists lurking on the
streets , in the buses even your auto rickshaw driver. We endure the daily
struggles of being a woman by being scanned up and down on the streets. We have
learnt to live with it , ignore it. We have no choice but to be adaptable
because that’s what we have been doing since we were born. WE are the
generation which can thrive successfully in both Bagalkot and Bangkok , in
Surat and in San Francisco. WE can cope with whatever life brings on to us head
on because we have been trained that way through our environment. WE do not
give up and do not let go , as that was never an option for us. And last but
not the least WE are the only generation which has seen the best and worst of
both the worlds !!!!!
