The Lucky Generation

The Lucky Generation

            The other day, I was in a family get-together. Lots of cousins, relatives and kinsmen were present. But the two youngest cousins caught my attention in particular. The sis, barely in her teens and just outta 10^th, was on her mobile phone 24×7- texting, calling, chatting, browsing, BBMing and what not. The bro, pursuing graduation, was in a zone of his own, totally oblivious of the external world. He was encapsulated in a world of gizmos, surrounded by a Dell laptop, an Apple i-pod, a Samsung tablet, Sony earphones, a Nokia cell phone, a Seagate hard-drive, a Transcend pen-drive and so on. Mind you, he had come from a different town carrying all this electronic entourage. Watching this took me to my days when I was barely out of school when even a cable TV was not a thing you’ll find in every household. Mind you, this wasn’t decades ago, just a few years ago. I was amazed at this incredible progress in technology and its impact on our lifestyles. This triggered a chain of thoughts in my fickle mind and what follows is an outcome of the same…

With the turn of the millennium and the rapid spurt in technology, the 80’s generation has been grossly neglected. Before we start, let’s make clear what the term 80’s generation means. This is the set of people born in the mid to late 1980’s but who grew up in the 1990’s. Thus, they were at the peak of their childhood & adolescence in the 90’s. They neither have the aura of the ‘ancient revered’ people who grew up in the ‘good old days’, nor are they considered among the digital natives-the so called Gen-next (I absolutely abhor that term. How can a particular set of people be next generation? Isn’t every generation a next generation for the preceding one?). It’s like this generation has been totally overlooked since they neither are a part of those people who saw significant history nor are they inherently part of the technological era that is making history.

From now on, I’ll talk of this generation in the first person. To begin with, I’ll refer to our generation as the “Lucky Generation”. This is the one that has served as a bridge between the past and the present. We are abreast with the latest trends & gizmos, yet we have experienced life before it. We were never too old to come to terms with the latest tools, gadgets. At the same time, we were not naïve enough to let technology control our daily lives. We grew up at a time when Apple and Blackberry were fruits, chatting used to be face-to-face or over a landline telephone with a circular dial and someone playing Dave on a coloured monitor at home was from super-affluent family.

We have seen India transform from a so called land of snake-charmers to one of the fastest growing economies of the world. For us, ‘billionaires’ used to exist only in English cinema and now Indians feature in the top 5 richest persons in the world. We have seen people waiting for ages to buy a Bajaj scooter, queue up for ‘trunk’ calls and stare in awe at computers. But we are also testimony to the fact that India has one of the largest mobile subscriber base, is a preferred destination for IT and companies like Tata, Bharti make acquisitions all over the globe.

Coming to entertainment, it’s our generation that has seen superstars like Shahrukh Khan take his first steps towards stardom through ‘Fauji’ and ‘Circus’. We were amongst the ones to see A.R. Rehman gain national applause for his work in Roja and now he is a global phenomenon. Madhuri’s immortal grace and beauty was at its peak when our generation enjoyed its movies the most. We were probably the last to see actors in a form that resembled the common man in day-to-day life and not the chiselled hunks and Greek gods that are on display these days. I still believe that no one has reached the same dizzy heights of stardom post SRK and Madhuri. We loved our masala movies. All the same, we are still a part of the audience that loves off-beat movies, when villains are as rare as the element Astatine, movies are moving towards more rational and relevant topics and Bollywood names in foreign cinema are more frequent than before.

When I write, can cricket be far behind? We have seen Sachin Tendulkar embarking on his journey towards greatness, before he had media and internet showcasing him in those weary stats and figures. We have seen how India used to depend solely on him, the pain of seeing how our team were tigers at home but failed to perform overseas. It was in our school days that legends like Sourav, Rahul made their debuts and served the nation for a long period. We witnessed how the team slowly started winning overseas, more people started raising their hands and how Tendulkar was no longer the ‘lone warrior’. Our generation had the privilege of watching a lot of multi-nation tournaments rather than the dull bilateral series that are played now a days. Those wonderful tri-series, tournaments in Sharjah, more neutral matches were exciting with drama over reaching the final. Another factor that is no longer prevalent today was that all teams used to sport jerseys of similar design made for a tournament, instead of the same designs sported today for all purposes. At the same time, our generation had the magnanimity to take to the 20-20 format and has supported shorter versions with open arms instead of the cribbing that older generations have dished out.

I cannot forget how the world has become smaller right in front of our eyes. In my childhood, travelling by flight was for the few affluent people and that too, only for international destinations. And today, I am in a situation where I have flown almost 20 times in the last year only within India. Coming to phone calls, even an inter-city call would be handled with immense precision and to-the-point conversations to avoid huge bills. Today, people talk across the globe with a variety of devices including video-calls.

We are amongst the last to have played on the streets, first to have played video games, seen cartoons in colour. We were the last to have recorded programmes on VCRs and music on tape cassettes but the first ones to burn, rip and download music onto CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays and MP3 players. We used to enjoy the Sunday mornings on Doordarshan with Mahabharat, Jungle Book and Chandrakanta followed by Chitrahaar, were thrilled by the arrival of DD-Metro (does anyone even know this now?). Yet today, we effortlessly ‘surf’ through a plethora of channels using Digital set-top boxes. We know the original Cartoon Network, which had the Hanna Barbera toons, Yogi, Flintstones, Jetsons, Scooby-doo, the macho Power Zone housing Centurions, Captain Planet, Swat Kats much before the slimy mudball that the channel has become now with series featuring the ugliest of animations and weirdo characters. We prided ourselves on acquiring a new game cartridge everytime to be played on Atari, Nintendo TV video games which had blockbuster games like Mario, Adventure Island, Tank, Tetris and Contra. This thrilled used to double when playing Paratrooper, Prince and Dave on MS-Dos based computers with limited display colours. Floppy drives used to be a major data portability device yet we are equally at ease with carrying at least two 1TB hard-drives housing seasons of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and the Big Bang Theory! Accessing internet via 56kbps dial-up connections was the notion of liberation for us, yet today, we manage to work from hand held devices that can manage internet speeds more than 10 Mbps.

We never had club houses, gyms and pools in our residential complexes, yet we had a plethora of games like hide-n-seek (won’t mention other games due to the unfamiliarity of names in different vernacular lingo). We used to ride cycles not only for fun but also to schools and shops. We travelled in cars without seatbelts or air-bags, had to roll-up the windows using hands and lock the doors using keys. We were the ones to have at least glimpsed pagers and Walkmans, plus experienced chargeable incoming calls on mobiles. We went to single screen theatres with huge seating capacities having a ‘stalls’ and ‘balcony’ concept. Standing in long queues for that elusive 35/- balcony ticket, having those local & affordable popcorns in the interval and avoiding the public washroom in general was a day of fun for us. We actually loved watching TV ads. Then advertisements had high recall value – remember the Washing powder Nirma jingle, buland Bharat ki buland tasveer- Hamara Bajaj, the crazy girl running with  (kuch khas hai hum sabhi mein ) Cadbury Dairymilk. And mind you, there was nothing official about Pepsi while Boost was always the secret of our energy along with Kapil Dev and a teenage Sachin!

To summarise, there might be a lack of aura around our generation, nevertheless we had a great time!

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