When Your Parents Say "Hamare Zamane Mein...."

Read an interesting article the other day. It was a study on how “elders feel happy reading negative news about their younger generation and apparently, reading such articles gives boost to their self esteem”

This immediately reminded me of all those times when my parents read something in the paper or watched on television about the “young” behaving (rather misbehaving) and quickly equated that to their own daughter. I used to wonder what’s wrong with them! But parents being parents ALWAYS like to have a say while you are only left with two choices - 1. To listen and pay heed or 2. To listen and forget it about (Honestly, I’ve more often done the latter)

Coming back to the article, it said “proving the younger generation wrong makes them feel more ‘right’ about what they say or do” Obviously so! When have parents EVER agreed that they are wrong? But let’s give them a benefit of doubt and understand what led to this study.

Often, there is a genuine unrest amongst the elders when kids tend to rebel, argue, answer back or disagree. From kid’s perspective, it’s about proving a point about how they are right and from the parent’s perspective – the disagreement generally arises from their own growing up experiences and what they understand is correct. So don’t think it’s fair to say one is right or the other is wrong.

For example – our parents grew up listening to LP records while we on IPods. Their idea of study was reading books, ours to surf the internet. For them going out was generally with family, for us it’s with friends. Their idea of a comedy movie was Amol Palekar's “Golmal” while for us it’s Ajay Devgan's “Golmal Returns”, they were taught ‘never to question their adults' while we always try to reason out. Classic case of generation gap...you think? Well, I look at this as a classic case of Exposure.

Times have changed and with that, the level of exposure has changed. Things that happen now happened during our parent’s times too but were hardly spoken about. Like, how often would you catch teenagers getting busted in drugs racket on good old Doordarshan news? Never! It’s not that drugs didn’t happen then...remember the 70’s era...the dum maro dum age...the entire Woodstock living? But now with exposure to media (in any form) every little thing gets a disproportionate amount of focus (Refer – the recent case of Staniuslaus boys getting caught drinking/smoking on a scout’s trip to Bordi or the news report on India TV with a bold headline “youngistaan ka chumma” when young lovers were seen kissing publicly near India Gate)

Hmmm....so now that we know we are in the spotlight and can’t do anything about it... lets live with the fact that parents are watching/listening/reading and no matter how disciplined you are or how high your morals are or how much you try and reason with them...there will always be that small percentage of lingering doubt in their mind about your conduct. (And this % varies from 5 to 99)

So the bottom-line is – you can’t expect your parents to change at this age and if watching such reports/reading such articles gives a boost to their self esteem and makes them proud of how superior their generation was, so be it. (As clearly stated in the article I read)

After all, they are our parents and we can let go of this much for them right?