Generation Gap

Wow!!! A very well known phrase used by all of us at one or the other point in life. Have we tried to get the clear idea of where does this come from?

I hail from a traditional Marwari joint family (My father has 7 siblings, all their families stayed together until I grew into an adult). I had seen 3 generations living together while I grew up. My father and grandmother had differences in almost all walks of life. Starting with say - how much freedom should be granted to his newly married wife, how much and where should his daughter be completing her education to whether its ok to let her work and have her own financial and social independence.

I had seen my father struggling to explain this to her mother about how things have changed from the her time to his. There was a time when my grandmother did understand the differences and tried to come to terms with all the changes which my father proposed. With all due respect to everyone we stayed together for quite a long period as a big happy family.

Well things did change again when me and my cousins started growing up. We started seeing the generation gap between our parents and us. Our perceptions of life changed, our friends circle changed. As we grew up we realized we think so different than our parents and at points it used to become so difficult to make them understand why there are differences and how should we deal with it.

The reason was very clear our parents and we grew up in a different social culture. Today I am staying in a different city than my parents because of my job and hence have a very different social culture than what my parents have in my native. His social culture is mostly people of his age group ,similar cultures and traditions and very probably similar fields of work.

My social culture consists of my school-college friends,collegues, networking sites etc. I have people of different age groups, different cultural backgrounds, different fields of work. I interact with a more diverse group than them. I am bound to have a more diverse perception of life than them. Now if there are some topics where our thoughts don’t match or we don’t approve of each other’s actions about some situation it is very very natural.

This is a very common problem of most of us in India. Indian society itself is going through so many changes because of the new technology, new ways of communication, and the economic and social reforms going on in every walk of life.

A possible solution I could think of us why not give little more push towards making our circles overlap? Instead of blocking them away from our day to day life updates why not include them in? We all live out of Gtalk/Orkut/Facebook/Twitter now a days. Why not include our parents there as a friend along with the endless list of friends we might have? Why not let them have a sneak peak into what goes on in our lives?

Agree there might start some fights or privacy intrusion but can we not try to talk the differences out? I just felt that if we give them a sneak peak of our social culture they probably can get an idea of where does our ideas come from when we speak. Who knows we might be able to empathize with each other a little more.(Read as “ trying to fit into each other’s shoes and feel what we go through daily” )

I know I know I am going to get lots of bashing saying that’s insane it is just going to increase the problems as they might have problems in so many things we say/do in our social networking site… But if we want to really bridge the gap we need to start somewhere. I might be wrong in my idea here but this could work also right? I thought we can give it a try atleast…. If we can genuinely bridge this gap won’t our life be more of fun.

Let us try reducing the use of this phrase rather than increasing. I am sure 20 years from now we might also face similar generation gap with our kids… Who knows this experience today might reduce that future gap which we can anticipate?

Think over it…

Have a wonderful Christmas !!!
Happy New Year!!!