First there was the Vodafone ad in which father and son alike actually run from a gecko screaming for their respective parents. Next I witnessed, on a trip to the cinema with my own parents, the scene in the somewhat pretentiously made film, 'Queen', in which the brawny black Frenchman, the wacky little Korean guy and the cool Ukranian dude, not to mention our eponymous heroine, all feel compelled to climb onto the tallest bed when another gecko (assuming the director didn't borrow the earlier one) darts across their washroom floor.
All this must have moved me subconsciously, enough to hold a conversation with a younger colleague, largely about where the men of today's generation, being of a gender that has historically, to a great extent, tutored themselves and members of other genders in the virtues of bravery, is headed to in terms of bearing that mantle, and he tells me a thing or two about the importance of emotional fortitude which, it seems, is the forte of today's youth.
This gets me to reread an opinion I wrote up in the summer of 2008 in which I make the limited point that tact not grit is the area of expertise of the 20-somethings of six years ago. Well, times HAVE changed since then but some of the points, to my mind, of course, since it's me who's saying this, still hold good. I was as hungry for a well-argued rebuttal then as I am now---for the greater good, a subjective viewpoint as this is and as my young friend rightly pointed out, so no emotional setback from a realization of time wasted there. Hence feel free to come in with your comments after you read this, unedited, piece.
A survey by Cartoon Network profiles today's schoolgoing generation as a cellphone-brandishing, videogame-playing, career-driven, indoorsy lot significantly more shaken by global warming than world poverty, though conveniently championing the cause of world peace.
While outwardly more pragmatic and cosmopolitan in their outlooks, these denizens of Youngistaan International revel in snubbing spontaneous daring and drive as demonstrated in Pepsi's response to Akshay Kumar's machismo in the popular Thums Up ad.
There a pair of conveyor belt gits gets the lines, laughs and the girl while the actor's nerve-wracking, if a tad misogynistic--which was innocent, I am sure, desparado is portrayed not as skill but a merely "desperate" attempt at attention.
Yet seamer Sreesanth's tears are acknowledged with a one-tournament-and-five-ODI ban of his tormentor and, while Arundhati Roy, the writer, chafes at her 'activist' label (she has now 'grown' to fit and like it, quite lamentably) and laments at the 'criminalization of liberal space' and how unpopular it is today to take political sides, west of Atlantic, Wall Street Journal's Zachary Karabell mourns the demise of the American can-do in 'Who Stole The American Spirit?'
There are no public intellectuals worth their salt below the age of 50 in today's youth-driven milieu, complains a writer in a leading national daily, unlike in the 1980's when journalists, scientists and lawyers fired youthful spirits and shaped the imagination of millions.
Indeed, hot is out and cool is in. It is almost sacrilegious for today's youth-driven media to criticize what it likes to believe is the largest section of its readership. For, as George Orwell famously said, a genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.
But as Gen X kidults (those born between 1965 and 1976) raise increasingly supercilious but preternaturally foresightful children and pampered Gen Y (born between 1982 and 1997) graduates invade the workforce, change is being felt, especially in countries like India which have a higher population below 30, and the shifts in attitude have arrived to stay.
Year 2007 has witnessed the rise of the small town young man, at least in Indian cricket, and the growth of positive provincialism as epitomized, according to his fan following, by ODI skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni and a spread of new nationalism and social consciousness in the form of the 'Rang De Basanti'-inspired candle-bearing brigade.
It has gained its own quantum of success whether in pushing a certain state government onto its back foot over the abetted suicide of a computer teacher, Rizwanur Rehman, or in gaining a measure of justice for the slain model Jessica Lall.
In the earliest part of the last century, times were more turbulent. Jyotirmoyee Devi, now 92, was a teenage bride. She was also a member of the Surya Sen-Ananta Singh-Pritilata Waddedar circle when she risked her life to help them carry out the Chittagong armoury raid.
But on a more regular basis, Jyotirmoyee would "sneak out of home in the dead of night and ride her bicycle to the meetings of freedom fighters." Her mother-in-law covered for her. "If neighbours saw me returning in the morning and asked her where I had been, she would say: 'Had my daughter-in-law not been at home, who, do you suppose, would have done all the housework?'" Jyotirmoyeereminisces.
The new millennium belle is still loathe to walk at night. While the late 1980s outcry regarding 'feminization' of the world economy and culture may have been partly unjustified in its vitriol, it is the role of a corrupt feminism that has led to a steady devaluation of the traditionally masculist ideals of strength and fortitude rather than their nurture or even reclamation by womankind.
But the young glibly denounce as platitudes what many before them have struggled to experience and utter and be and own and occupy and feel automatically entitled to freedoms and benefits their more downwardly mobile predecessors have fought and sacrificed to earn and acquire for them with scant respect for their tribulations.
For it is market rather than social engineering or reform, as it was known earlier, that transforms mindsets now. Women today choose tailored garments over the sari or visit a disc or the workplace largely because these options are now simply available in shops, commerce and families (and fashionable, too, from associations to ideas of western advancement).
Political correctness has been conflated with political conformism and convenience, not consistency and neither integrity, is the operating word.
Some believe that the present ennui and widespread lack of social and political morals and interest among today's youth, many of whom do not even exercise their franchise in our country, may be a backlash of the political turmoil of the past centuries. Others place its onus on the activities of the UN since the last world war and subsequent progress made by societies.
But progress has rendered the young western national blasé and effete, says Steve D Howe, CEO and nuclear physicist, and unwilling to take on big, tough challenges. It has made him pessimistic, writes Karabell in his article, buckling under the current economic woes even if they "aren't even close to some of this century's worst periods, and not even as bad as what was once considered prosperous".
The world peace brokered by UN has only been partial. And even as genocides happen in faraway Rwanda, one lakh Sudanese live uncertain of seeing the next dawn and 1,000 human lives are wiped out in the span of a single day by a ruthless Congolese junta, these events are still of little import to the rest of the world because they are happening in countries that are economically weak and diplomatically powerless.
In fact, it took four years for stories of the 1994 Tutsi massacre of one million by the Hutus to trickle out in the form of individual accounts, first published in Readers Digest, to world press. Short of westernization and a dual citizenship, the youth from these countries have no voice of their own.
And even as western nationals covertly regard most Asians and Africans as needy, opportunistic beings, hungry to emigrate for "a better lifestyle" more than anything else, desperation and push gives way to loss of kindness and etiquette: an international survey last year ranked Delhi and Mumbai (indeed the only Indian metros examined) and not New York, as is the stereotype, among the infamously rude cities of the world.
Truly, discreet rudeness and tactful group dynamics have developed into a social artform to be mastered by watching reality shows like Bigg Boss championing conspiracy games where players vote out one from amongst themselves as the programme progresses which have taken off in India much like the proverbial duck taking to water.
Meanwhile, academics in developing countries becomes 'safe' and 'job-oriented' and parents coerce their children to study rather than take up music or sports, choose science rather than arts in high school, enroll in engineering instead of the pure sciences in college and finally specialize in the lucrative fields of management or software and earn at least five times more than a member of parliament who, himself, takes home a fat sum.
The results? These have been three-fold. Apart from the vacuum in the fields of history, anthropology, law and the humanities, subjects that indeed contribute to the knowing and building of a nation, what was confusion and brain drain in the previous generation (X) has congealed into single-ended competition among Y-Gen who have sacrificed versatility, adventure, talent and idealism at the altar of success of their career designs.
And while the department of Hindu Mathematics in Lucknow University has only four students, all of them Japanese at the start of the century, our adult-clothes-wearing, uber-urban tween would rather spend time alone with his Xbox or Windows Messenger in the evenings than join his mates for a good old game of football.
What with GPS and the ubiquitous mobile phone, knowledge and navigation have been rendered unnecessary, learning--at least of what is of immediate use--available at the click of a mouse, travel synonymous to jet-set touring and malls the new teenage hangout as well as tourist destinations.
Gone are the dangers of the strange and pleasures of the unknown, the unstinted privacy of the willing hermit. You can't get lost anymore, your cell will find you. Young Truman, played by Jim Carrey in 'The Truman Show', is too late wishing to be an explorer when he grows up. "There is nothing left to explore anymore."
It is time to accept that today's 'brave, new generation' is indeed low on the virtues of courage and stamina while high on caution and planning. It is time to stop sheer spirit being shattered under the wheels of evolution even as money and technology renders know-how and get-go redundant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sNmrDO1Kbw
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