The New Generation Gap

It's been a thought of mine for quite sometime now. I'm almost certain about it though. I too am at the opposite end of a generation gap now. No longer the youngest in any of the standard demographics, I too am now guilty of being at complete odds with young people (well, younger than me) doing things I didn't imagine would happen so soon.

Back in high school, my english teacher, Mrs. Radha Murali had said when one refers to a generation the time span they're referring to is 30 years. 3 decades. If this numeric interpretation of the word "generation" is purely linguistic, then we probably are coming to a time where it has to be redefined. Now 24, (well, 25 in a few months) I've been feeling like there's a whole new generation out there that's come in just a few years after me. A louder, more talkative, a more thrifty, consumerist, set of people that seems so inclined to leaving the country for good, sometime in their mid-20's.

When the first year's joined college that year, the usual stream of events that follow the occurrence ensued. Amongst the ones who had just gotten a rung higher into the second year, most guys were sieving the herd to spot all the pretty girls, a lot of the newly "seniored" looking for which of the silent lambs they could push around for a joke or two, the oldest in college, the final years couldn't come to terms with just how naiv- I mean, young the first years looked, and the in-betweens, the third years... myself included, couldn't get over how different things had been just two years earlier.

It was around the time, maybe 6 months or so into it, that cellphone rates had fallen across the country. "Hutch" had already made an incredible impact with it's "Hi" ads, and become incredibly popular thanks to a son of a bitch. Compact, cheap, durable cellphones were a norm rather than exceptions. And for some reason, almost as if responsive to the overdose of electronics in campuses, cash registers everywhere were ringing with splurging teens visiting multiplexes to clubs to the newly popular malls. ("They're soon going to be everywhere", we were told). I was almost dumbstruck. Almost, because there's almost Nothing that will make me speechless (except maybe people telling that they're getting married, and this seems to be happening with an astonishing regularity these days, but more on that in the other blog maybe)

Here's the part where I feel old. Almost no one in a college of 3600 students, had a cellphone when I just joined. In a little over two and a half years, almost none was without one. But the difference it made seemed glaring to me. We didn't walk around with a phone worth 3 or 4 thousand in our pocket, we did so with bus charge for the day, and a few extra one rupee coins for the one rupee coin booths on campus. (And, they had to be the correct kind of coins, others wouldn't work). Parents didn't hound us on the phone at half past 4 in the evening trying to get us to come home. Friends (that word really meant a lot) kept appointments, and didn't call last minute to cancel. And when we sat in class, as the lecturer or professor taught us, we daydreamed and chatted amongst ourselves like decent students. Not hide a phone and message people in weird languages (w r u, I m 4 nt 2 der da cnt b dis easy- does anyone really understand that?!)

And let me not even start on our culinary expenditures. In the second year of Pre-university college, I spent 200 rupees on treating my friends on my birthday. A couple of years later, in engineering, I spent almost the same amount. We had filter coffee. It should almost be expected how shocking and unbelievable it was, that somehow, another two years from then, people were quite comfortable with spending about ten times that much (-at least, at least 10 times). Yes, salaries had gotten better over those two years, but a lot had gotten cheaper too. Computers were priced at half the rates for twice the better configurations (thereby being 4 times cheaper!). We had emailed each other, and downloaded scores of mp3's (at least 3 a day) on superfast 56Kbps dial-up internet (I used to get a pristine 4KBps download speed sometimes you know). At only around 800-1200 rupees a month (depending on how long you stayed online of course) we got to use Napster for the then not-illegal downloads, Hotmail and Yahoo were by far the most popular email options of course. We were still fascinated by how fast this new "Google" search was. Soon it transpired that spending 1000 rupees for that ridiculously low amount of data transfer was outrageous, and even more outrageous were single digit KBps download speeds. The same hotels stayed with hardly any change in the prices (Inflation was low back then.. Different governments you see.. hehe) From 5 rupees per minute (damn, that's cheap) for an outgoing call to talking for 20 minutes with the same amount, everything had suddenly gotten cheaper in a matter of months. So why were people spending so much more than ever before?!

I should clarify that I am by no means referring to a single age group of people, the changes I talk off, I see in people of all ages.

It's cliched of course to say how much easier it is to keep contact these days, what with messages, and with 3G, video conferencing. It's even more cliched to say, that as easy as it has become, it's become rarer that people actually do keep in contact. Even when random accidental meetings happen, the very environment that has made everything so much easier, seems to take over conversations. Maybe I'm being an absolute surd (irrational) about this whole issue, change is after all a good thing. In the last three weeks I have witnessed four weddings, two engagements, and two divorces. Have we perhaps changed so fast that we don't deal with it ourselves? Don't get me wrong, I had; a PC-XT (40MB Hard-disk, 256KB RAM, don't even ask me what the supposed processor speed was), above said dial-up connection, and 2 rupees in my pocket that, if spent, would be seriously frowned upon; as a teenager. So I'm glad as anyone else for all the high speed stuff we have today, along with my many favourite restaurants (expensive). But as the purist in me occasionally surfaces to Tssk Tssk at the state of affairs today, it angers me to no end to see people spend 300 rupees on crassly commercial movies in overpriced and pretentious multiplexes. Even with 200 bucks worth of flowers ordered online, endless messages exchanged over the phone and on various instant messaging modules, it pains me to see people unable to conduct full fledged conversations in person, without being intoxicated with one thing or the other.

Again, I should say, maybe this is just paranoia, a culture shock of a very weird kind. But somewhere I'd like to believe that the times haven't changed the fact that other people should be more important to us, than the amenities that help us keep in touch. I can't help but be saddened when losing a cellphone is the reason (maybe even an excuse?) someone's just completely gone out of touch with me for a year... What? There weren't friends in the world before cellphones and the internet? With such disdain shown about personal relationships, it's hardly unexpected that very few people have any sort of connection with the bigger things in life. Caring about a country's future. The fight for the environment. Humanity and kindness in the face of adversity. Why would you care for a stranger you've only just met if you stopped caring for a friend because you lost your cellphone?

Like I said, this seems to be the case with people across different ages. Is the New generation gap more to do with the availability of resources than how old we are? Hope this gap doesn't turn from being one between generations to one between humanity itself...