Skip to main content

Generation Today




One of the reasons why I love teaching is that I am more comfortable with the young generation than with adults.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I haven’t really grown up.  I remain young at heart.  I still nurture youthful dreams and ideals.  I still hope for a better world and believe that it is possible to create such a world, a world in which people will be more sensible and sensitive.  My cynicism belongs to the adult part of my being.

The present edition of IndiSpire asks the following question: 


 My experience is that the young people embrace privacy out of helplessness.  It’s not that they wish to be confined to their private spaces; it’s that they don’t find people in whom they can confide fearlessly.  I have had innumerable experiences of youngsters wanting to spend time with me discussing their personal problems.  My regret has been that I couldn’t afford to give them the time they deserved. 

Ravi Zacharias said in one of his books that in the 1950s children lost their innocence, in the 60s their authority, in the 70s their love, 80s their hope, 90s their power to reason, and in the new millennium the children woke up and found out that they had lost their imagination. 

Zacharias attributes this condition to the violence and perversion that has become endemic.  I think there are other reasons too: people are too busy to give time to their children, in addition to the predominance of the social media and other things that keep youngsters pivoted to their mobile phones or other gadgets. 

They are searching for something genuine in those things: social media and the gadgets.  There is so much counterfeit in our world that the youngsters are confused.  The youngsters want genuineness.  They see that everything from the food they consume to the god they are taught to worship is contaminated.  They search for authenticity.  They can identify the authentic with the dexterity of a connoisseur.  You can’t bluff them.  Once they know that you are genuine they shed inhibitions.  And they have infinite questions to ask. 

So, to answer the IndiSpire question: yes, many things have changed. The world is not what it was twenty years ago.  The world confuses the young and they search for answers to a lot of questions.  It is because the adults are incapable of or unwilling to provide the answers that the youngsters go into the privacy of their little spaces and continue the search in many wrong places.  The answers are important to them.  If you can provide the answers, you will find the youngsters coming out of their little spaces.  I guarantee this.


Comments

  1. Rajeev MoothedathSeptember 10, 2017 at 6:23 PM

    "It is because the adults are incapable of or unwilling to provide the answers that the youngsters go into the privacy of their little spaces and continue the search in many wrong places"- Interesting observation!

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownSeptember 12, 2017 at 8:41 AM

    The major problem I feel is that they have become so adamant with their ideas. And not just young, even the older generation doesn't wish to shed their beliefs. I guess they are all afraid. Afraid to unlearn things it took them an eternity to learn. Afraid to realize that nothing's wrong or right, what they are fighting for, ready to shed blood for, ready to rally for, can also be stupid in someone's eyes. I wish I could vanish after writing this. :(

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
14 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
15 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more