Jai Arjun Singh
It’s only human to think of one’s own generation as somehow more significant than others. I’m 29, and my conversations with friends of the same age (or two to three years in either direction) often centre on the “old days”. This nebulous period is variously represented by memories of: watching Doordarshan on black-and-white TVs (Chitrahaar, Sunday morning Star Trek, the evening films that represented the high point of the week’s entertainment); six-digit phone numbers from an age before cellphones; Delhi’s roads before the first Maruti 800s; the pre-Internet days when collecting even the most basic factoid could take hours; computers that ran only on a monochrome dos.
Then we talk about today’s kids, only a few years younger than we are but who might as well have dropped in from another planet, since most of them have no memory at all of these things. This makes us feel old, wise and special.
Much of this is, of course, the nostalgia-addled Golden Ageism that every generation engages in. And yet there is a basis for the dislocation sometimes experienced by urban, middle-class Indians my age. The fact is, during the years we went from adolescence to adulthood, the world immediately around us saw defining changes over a relatively short period: from around 1991-92, when the economy opened up, to a few years ago, when cellphones and the Internet became imperative to our lives. Sometimes, trying to reconcile what the world was when we were children with the way it is now, we feel we’re straddling a huge divide. It’s a giddy feeling.
Speaking as one who doesn’t care for people putting themselves and others into convenient little boxes, I find globalisation inherently appealing. Recently, an ex-colleague took his American girlfriend home to meet his at-least-partly-orthodox family. Some awkwardness resulted, but on the whole there was a greater acceptance of the relationship than there would have been just 10 years ago. It would be foolishly idealistic, especially in today’s climate of fear, to suggest that the world has become a global family, but it is true that never before in human history have people from so many different backgrounds been so uniquely placed to acknowledge each other’s existence and, in the best-case scenarios, overcome age-old prejudices. This sense, that many people are gradually losing their insularity, is something to be grateful for.
It’s pointless to try and list all the ways in which the opening up of the world has touched my life, but here’s one example. Around the age of 13, sated by years of Hindi films, I developed an interest in non-Indian cinema that was more than an amateur curiosity. I devoured books about film, spent hours reading up on and watching the classics, Hollywood at first and later world cinema. For the longest time I believed this passion would have to stay in a vacuum. Assuming that I continued to live and eventually work in India, where was the scope for, say, a career that involved writing about all this? Even among my own friends, there was hardly anyone who shared this interest; it had to stay a margin note in my life.
But when the world began to open up, I found people around me gradually becoming more curious about other cultures and, by association, movies from other cultures. Friends expressed interest in what they would once think of as “boring films” and asked me for recommendations. The dvd revolution helped in greater accessibility, and it became something of a trend to start personal libraries. I felt less of a misfit.
And then there was the Internet, “the planetary soul”, as a speaker at Davos once called it. A couple of years ago, I started a blog, initially a convenient online storehouse for my journalistic writings but increasingly a medium unto itself, where I could write about whatever I wanted to. Here I discovered how small the world had really become; within hours of posting a short piece about a favourite Hollywood classic, I received a comment from an LA-based filmmaker who was equally enthusiastic about the film and wanted to nitpick about something I’d written. Such interactions have grown over the months and have given me the sense of being part of a community more varied and far-flung than anything I could have imagined 15 years ago.
Naturally, there are downsides too. One thing I fear we’re losing is a sense of wonder. In the mid-1980s, it used to be a big thing for a child to see Toblerone chocolates in the hands of relatives visiting from abroad. Today, with nearly everything instantly available (still talking about the urban middle-class), little joys like those aren’t so easily found anymore. On the whole, children and youngsters seem more jaded, much less easily surprised, than we were at their age. There must be some truth to the clichés about how today’s kids have less scope for their imaginations.
So here’s a final, sentimental nod to a simpler age: a memory of the only time I ever used the school phone to call home. The afternoon bus had broken down and we were asked to inform our parents that we’d be late. The phone occupied one corner of a cavernous hall outside the principal’s office, we had to stand in line to use it, the dial was unwieldy and difficult to operate, and the whole experience had something thrilling about it — the buzz of excitement suggested that it was a strange, forbidden thing we were doing. School and home had been such separate worlds for me that I jumped at the sound of my mother’s voice filtering through that ancient instrument into a hall that was never supposed to be touched by a family member’s presence. The memory and the sense of adventure associated with it are still incredibly vivid.
Thinking of this, I reflect on the fact that many of today’s kids can simply yank out a tiny rectangular object and press exactly two keys to make a call home (naturally, they have their parents on speed-dial). And this doesn’t apply only to spoilt brats who go to air-conditioned schools; there was a news report a couple of years ago about the reaction of stricken parents and children to the cellphone ban in government-aided schools. Clearly we’re all more connected than we once were, but the idea of a world full of wonder and excitement is becoming more remote by the day. Perhaps there is such a thing as being too closely clustered together.
Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer. He writes the blog Jabberwock at http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com
