Nineteen years old today are different from nineteen years old twenty years ago. Twenty years is a long time, but things changed in many ways that people didn’t foresee or imagine to. The sudden advance of technology and globalization brought many changes to the industry but also closer to home. So contacting someone close doesn’t require one to wait in queue for half an hour and send one line messages, one simply has to flip out a tiny piece of plastic and circuits and chat their way to their heart’s content. While at the same time children find more time to spend with their mobiles and iPods than they want to spend with their close ones. Women took great time and effort in cooking food for the family, and now we see people just open cans, pour the contents in an oven and five minutes later you’ve got a meal for four. The increase in the availability of such items of reduced requisite labor was however brought so soon, that the coming generation was adopted to it, while the original generation couldn’t catch up to it, which leads to different foundations of personalities for them
The interesting thing which is beginning to appear here is the change of dynamics in relationships. People born and brought up twenty years ago associated with people. Their priority was how their relationships were defined with people, which is the reason why they were more docile and submissive towards their parents, and teachers. It’s not that people don’t respect their elders in the times of today; it’s just that they’ve grown more vocal and wish to have their opinions heard so that they can be treated as equals. However the other generation grew up conditioned as the “people” types wherein they followed the defined boundaries between generations which were never meant to be crossed.
On the other hand the current generation has grown associating with objects. It’s always been the things that they must have; goals that they must accomplish, putting their wants and needs ahead of the people around them. The said needs need not be physical or material such as the wants and carving for objects, but also transcend to being talked to as an individual, to be heard, to be followed. This is the reason why they cross the generation barrier and talk affront to the teachers and parents to get this done. Due to this difference of foundations there tends to be a feeling of disrespect from both sides at times. One believes that the new generation doesn’t trust their experience and respect and that they’ve strayed away by associating with said objects, while the other feels left out and disgruntled.
Hence to accomplish these wants they turn to people who will be able to provide for them: people of their own age. This is also the reason that it can be seen people tend to ‘hang out’ more with their own age groups than the time they spend with family. It’s more about going out with friends, taking a trip on the weekend and spending vacations goofing around each others’ house than may be take the traditional trip to their ancestral home. It’s more about how ‘cool and awesome’ their friends are, how much they want to be and how their parents and teachers are ‘not getting’ them.
First there’s the rule, then there’s the exception to the rule, which is why it feels nice to observe exceptions to these relationships as well. Quite a few parents and teachers have started to understand this aspect of their children’s lives, and they choose not to drastically change them but to accept them for who they are and try to make some good out of it. Part of this understanding leads them to talk openly about issues, like the troubles they’re facing, their take on certain things. There are times when they are the best friends, having fun when nothing is there to do, a beacon of hope of in the vast sea of life, and a guiding moral compass should their own ever falter. At the same time there’s a change coming in the new generation as dwell. Not only have they become more respectful of the experience and views of the older generations, they at time actively seek it for guidance. A sense of mutual respect and appeal is seen in many ways where the parents seek the advice of children when it comes to the choice of items like electronics, or maybe even the color of the walls.
So what we see here is a mutually symbiotic relationship, where in the generation which has people as the foundation of their core values now receives respect, and the generation which has objects as their core receives not just material objects but also psychological ones which doesn’t make them feel left out. Yes things are not as picture perfect as the way we see in tele vision series like The Brady Bunch, or may be as grand as the Sooraj Barjatia movies, where big families often come together come across vast differences in to one single unit. No, those are movies and series, and you get paid to act and say things in them. Real life has different issues, different stories, different scales of how this goes and how all the little things which we overcome to bring two generations together. How we appreciate that it’s not just camera cell phones, and laptops that matter but also the people who guide us in our lives and listen to us and when we need them the most. That it’s about building bridges and reaching out to people with different set of minds.
