Generation gap?

I was born in India in the early 1970's. Looking back at that time from the perspective of today's world, it seems like that was a very, very long time ago. Things have changed so much that often I feel the world in which I was born no longer exists, except in the memories of those who experienced it.

We used to live in Kolkata (then Calcutta). There was no TV at that time. Yes, I mean no TV at all. Television was introduced in Kolkata in 1975, and our family was among the early buyers of an "imported" black & white set (color TV transmission was still almost a decade away). "Imported" was a big status symbol in those times, by the way. Our neighbours used to come over to our house to watch the few Bollywood songs the state-owned media would deem fit to telecast once or twice a week. Folks used to look forward to watching these for days before the telecast, and discuss them for days after.

There was no phone at home. You could apply for one to the (state-owned) telephone company, either under the "ordinary" category for Rs. 1000 or under the "urgent" category for Rs. 8000. The expected waiting time for the ordinary category at that time was, hold your breath, 30 years! The "urgent" category, being urgent, came through in just 7 years! Little wonder we had already moved out of Kolkata by the time our phone was ready for installation. When we did get our first, clunky, black phone installed in Chandigarh, I remember the occasion warranted a small celebration with neighbours and friends. It was the done thing to have a party to celebrate a phone installation.

Most families did not own cars. Those who did had exactly two choices. Both were pathetic and outdated even for their time, but at least they were cars. When I was seven, my father bought one of those two types of cars, which we kept for the next 15 years.

You had to be someone important to reserve a seat in a train and air travel certainly raised eyebrows. I was eight when I first flew - from Chandigarh to Delhi - on the (state-owned) airline. We were treated like royalty, and I refused to remove the airline tag from my bag for several months thereafter.

The most sought after jobs were those that were handed out by the government, because they provided job security, housing and retirement benefits, too. Having said that, having any job at all was a good achievement for a young person at that time.

Banks and postal services were state-owned and specialised in being customer unfriendly; I remember being told to be extra polite to the "government lady" at the bank or the post office, and I was always a bit apprehensive to enter their offices. All their processes were manual, of course (I never set eyes upon a computer until I was 16). Good hotels and clubs were clearly for the elite, and I had never seen a mall, a condominium or a casino before I first traveled out of India at the age of 25.

Today, my two-year-old, Yash, has lived in three condos so far, has flown a total of 28 times to five countries, visits malls everyday, watches his nursery rhymes on wireless broadband on my Iphone and makes systematic efforts to ruin the electronic controls of my Mercedes!

If the world changed so much in the three and a half decades between me and Yash, how much more will it change by the time Yash grows up? Will Yash ever be able to appreciate the world I grew up in, and will I be able to comprehend his world when he is a young man?

Scary thought. Well, my Mom (who was born more than two decades before the dark ages I described above) uses a mobile phone, phone-banks, sends greeting cards over the internet, and even reads my blog! Much more important, we still share a few enduring values and time-tested principles that help us appreciate each other's situation, however different it might be from our own.

So, my dear Yash, as long as we come to share the same enduring values and as long as we love and care for each other, the massive differences in our external environment won't matter. I certainly hope so ... time will tell!