Every generation in human history is marked by its contributions. Sometimes, the contributions are profound and change the course of history. For example, look at the generation that had its prime of youth during World War II and the post-war decolonisation period. The generation and the one before that had gone through some of the toughest times in human history. Their time was marked by sacrifices, struggle, and idealism. This doesn’t mean everyone in that generation had those qualities, but those were their markers. Many of the youth in that generation went to jail, braved the lathis and guns of the colonial forces, and won us the freedom through great personal sacrifices. They left the world a better place than how it was when they inherited it, at least in India.
The next generation, whose prime was in the 60s and 70s in India, was the generation of nation builders. An impoverished nation, emerging from two centuries of colonisation, the bloodshed of Partition, the great Bengal famine, and world war, had its task cut out. They had the burden of making one of the poorest, most diverse, communally sensitive, and mostly illiterate regions self-sufficient at the height of a global Cold War. They got many things wrong, but when we look back, they were great institution creators. They kept democracy strong. If we look at the map, we find that we are one of the few surviving democracies among the erstwhile colonies. We became self-sufficient in food and milk. A substantial achievement for a country that had 15 million deaths in the Bengal famine. That generation fought three wars, of which they drew one with Pakistan, lost to China, but won a spectacular victory against Pakistan again, and made the country a nuclear power in between. When the victorious Prime Minister, who had made a cult of blindly devoted followers, imposed an emergency, the same generation had the guts, conviction, and idealism to take to the streets and save democracy. They build the country.
Next comes the generation that I belong to. We are the ones who came of age in the early or late 1990s. We had no major wars to fight, no colonial masters to get rid of, no emergency to rebel against. It was perhaps one of the best eras to grow up in. With liberalisation hitting us as we entered our productive years after college, the world was open to us like an oyster. The software boom had just started, and almost all of the middle-class kids were employed at starting pay packages far better than those the previous two or three generations could have dreamed of on the eve of their retirement. At that time, most of us thought we were going to be the ones to take India into the league of developed nations. The cities were booming; new malls were popping up everywhere; the golden quadrilateral was being built, and yet the media and the people in general were critical of the government, as we wanted more. There were more than 12 airlines operating from our airports, and almost all brands of automobiles from all parts of the world were here. Stock markets were booming, the real estate boom was real, and life was getting better and better for most people, though at a different pace. What marked the early 2000s, when we were in our 20s, was unadulterated optimism about the future of our country. China was ahead of us, but didn’t look so far ahead. We were the future.
Now, in 2026, when I have hit my 50s, I find we are the generation that frittered away all the chances we got. No generation in human history has been as selfish as those born in the 1970s and 1980s. We had all the advantages and very few of the disadvantages that our previous five or six generations had. And look what a mess we have out of it. Our cities look worse than they did 20 years ago. We breathe the world’s most poisonous air, drink toxic water, and live in the filthiest of streets. When it was time to question our governments, we became blind devotees of manipulative politicians. The educated and elite among us, the same group who in previous generations braved the British bullets or Sanjay Gandhi’s bulldozers, became fawning idiots and bigoted crackpots cheering for the bulldozer rajas of today. We stopped questioning and retreated to our cocoons, escaping India either physically or by retreating to our castles of gated communities, where we arranged for generators for power, private tankers for water supply, and maids and servants to clean the streets—all the functions of the State. Instead of leading from the front, we left the less fortunate at the mercy of the scheming politicians. We isolated ourselves into islands of prosperity floating in a sea of filth, leaving our less fortunate brethren to eke out a living out of the garbage hills we created. We cheered for journalists who were nothing but paid agents of political parties and learned to hate people whom we had never met just by their name. We deserve to live like this, as a third-world hellhole. It is now laughable to compare India with China, which is now centuries ahead of us.
Our only hope is that the generation that is coming of age now, those who are entering the voting age and their younger siblings, have inherited the selfless, idealistic and intelligent genes of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and evolution has skipped the cowardly, selfish DNA of ours, their parents.
mail@asura.co.in