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

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...
18 comments
Read more

Modi’s Art of Censorship

One of the infinite ironies about Narendra Modi’s India is its flagrant censorship while claiming to be the most tolerant civilisation. A Guardian report today informs us that Arundhati Roy’s 2020 book, Azadi , is banned in Kashmir for promoting a “false narrative and secessionism.” Being a fan of Ms Roy’s rebellious spirit, I buy her books as they are published. I had reviewed this book ( Azadi ) back in 2020 when it was published. The Congress government that ruled India for a very long period, before Modi’s rhetoric mesmerised the Indian electorate, was highly flawed. Corruption ran in its every single vein. Yet it was far better than what Modi brought in its place. The glaring hypocrisy of the Congress was a glue that held India together, Ms Roy says in this censored book of hers. What she means to say is that though secularism was not practised sincerely or consistently the pretence of it acted as a binding force that maintained a kind of social and political equilibrium. T...
9 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Solzhenitsyn’s Many Disillusionments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died a sad and disillusioned man. Solzhenitsyn was a genuine socialist in the beginning. He fought for the Red Army in WWII. He was a committed Soviet patriot. Equality, justice, and dignity of the workers were his ideals, his dreams. However, Stalin became a brutal dictator and Solzhenitsyn became his vocal critic. As a result, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag: a network of inhuman labour camps. Hundreds of Russians were tortured and killed in those camps and Solzhenitsyn was disillusioned with socialism. The Russian Revolution was supposed to have liberated the common citizens from imperial oppressions. However, the new government under Stalin was far more ruthless, unjust, and oppressive than the empire. The socialist ideology became a kind of deity for which everything else was sacrificed, including truth. Writing the story of his life in the camp in The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn warned that such systems coul...
9 comments
Read more