The supreme quality of an age is the mark it leaves on its people. Despite all the advances that we have made in knocking at the frontiers of knowledge, it is still not adequately appreciated that the physical conditions, the political system and economic circumstances of the era shape vitally the behaviour and mental make-up of the population.
Dictatorships leave people suspicious and nervous; they walk morosely, constantly looking over their shoulders to see as to who is following them.Thus cramped they, in turn, leave that corrosiveness as their mark on history. The grim art and literature of the Soviet era East Europe is an example of it. But it is not just the dictatorships; social conditions too can corrode the creative process.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels has a large section covered with paintings by Bosch. He was a great artist, but his art overwhelms with its grotesqueness. Most of his paintings are of starving and withering bodies. Many others are fantasies. All this was a reflection of times because in the 15th century, Western Europe was in a state of great turbulence.
The Catholic inquisition was in full sway; hangings, moral depravity and protests against the church were common place. Moreover thousands of people were dying due to plague and other epidemics. Since the printed word did not have a mass circulation then, paintings became the message. Bosch articulated the signs of the time by painting misery and weird life on canvass.
Yet, just around that time and barely a few hundred kilometres to the south, there were stirrings of a great renaissance. The same 15th century saw the flowering of some of the most joyous and delicate art the world has ever seen. All this was taking place in Italy because of the amazing financial boom it was enjoying under art loving royal patrons.
Centuries later, our age has been witness to this phenomenon repeatedly. Wars, recessions and periods of financial boom have each been moulding people after their own image. Thus those born before 1946 were called ‘The Silent Generation’ because of the deprivation of recession and then the hardships of the world war that they had to go through. An entire generation went through their life with their heads largely down.
Then, came the sunshine years of peace and plenty. No wonder that people born after the War came to be known as ‘The Baby Boomers’. There was optimism in the air and people had money enough to experiment with life and lifestyle. Who, for example, can forget the heady days of the late Sixties, 1968 in particular, when the students erupted in a revolt that was daring yet endearing? Love and lament were equally in the air.
Up until today, people continue to be nostalgic about the experimentation and the care-free abandon of the hippie age. Its excesses may have consumed the gullible but the joy of that age also led to a bountiful flowering of the mind. If Ravi Shankar, Mahesh Yogi and Beatles were beckoning the world to an exotic era, groups like ABBA were lilting out an altogether new beat. Fashion and literature were strumming refreshingly bold themes, even as technology was reaching for the moon. And why just the moon, the IT age is largely the product of the imagination of The Baby Boomers.
Yet, having been so productively fertile otherwise, that generation seems to have faltered on the reproductive front. The wonderful world of plenty that was their creation was brought to its knees by their offspring. It is the children of the Baby Boomers, people born in the Sixties and thereafter, who became the financial masters of the world at a very young age.
They are the ones who were making the major decisions in the banks of New York that led to the financial meltdown. It remains to be seen if and when the world would recover from that setback. But one result of this single-minded pursuit of money is the drying up of the creative juices in other fields.
Art and literature are no longer seeded with striking new ideas as was earlier the case. One doesn’t hear of path-breaking writers or great sculptors any longer. Now it is the staid sameness. The young no longer demand the impossible, like those who had so famously barricaded the streets of Paris in 1968.
Now the only outrage the youth seek is in the impossible scale of their pay packets. Perhaps that is why the latest generation; the ones who were born after 1980 are known as the ‘Y’ generation.
They are the ones who question every issue with a ‘Y’ (Why). Y should I get a job? Y should I shift out and find my own home? Y should I clean my room? And so on the list can go on. Of course they aren’t all like that and it would be unfair to tar them with the same brush. But caught as they are between the age of plenty and the current atmosphere of uncertainty, they could well turn out to be a confused lot. That is a worrying prospect because a lot of previous generations; from those of the Silent Age to the Baby Boomers and thereafter would be dependent on the decisions and the actions of this ‘Y’ generation. Their acts of commission and omission would influence our daily life far more intimately and comprehensively than ever before in history.
Earlier, in the previous ages, people lived in units of families, tribes and communities; often disconnected from the daily destinies of the other. But in our age ‘Globalisation’ is the intrusive buzz word. Even if there is no integral link between the Wall Street and Dalal Street, yet our stocks plunge every time Dow dips.
The ‘Y’ generation therefore carries an enormous extra cross; one that might hold them accountable for huge oil spills like the one in USA now, or for failing to meet the minimum aspirations of the tribals vis-a-vis their heritage of natural resources. But isn’t it is all so unfair. Y (Why) should the Y generation be called upon to shoulder the burdens of the past? ‘Y’ for example should they be held accountable for the financial philandering of the Wall Street types who were born a generation before them? And Y must they clean up the mess of an oil spill or a nuclear disaster for decisions taken by the previous generations? ‘Y’ generation is still raw of age and one of immense innocence. It was bred on plenty with promises of a lot more in perpetuity.
They were told to believe that all will always be well, that the good times would just keep rolling. Yet the tide has turned, abruptly and painfully. And with the governments across the world tightening belts, consumer spending is going to be squeezed steadily making good times feel like a mirage.
About the author:
The writer is a former Ambassador