A Story of the Twilight Generation

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I belong to a generation that has spent most of its life being intimidated and living in fear; never having the courage or the confidence to break away from being conventional and speaking its mind and living boldly as it should. Being a woman has compounded the problem. Being a girl child has never been easy-anywhere in the world; but being born a girl, forty years ago in India, was tough. It meant you had to spend your whole lifetime trying to prove your usefulness; to find a reason for others to excuse your existence.

 Now when my hair is flecked with grey and I look with pride at the confident faces of my grown up daughters a sigh, nevertheless, escapes from the depths of my being. Things have changed in the past 25 years, but somehow I and my compatriots, have missed the boat. First we were scared of our fathers, then our brothers, then our husbands and now our children. We seem to be perpetually caught in limbo and never fully transitioning into a mature, respectable state.

I remember, when I was growing up, we had to ask permission to make a phone call- from our own homes. The calls had better not be more than five minutes because then you could not have had anything important to talk about. The telephone was a utility service and keeping the phone lines jammed for long was a potential hazard. How silly to gossip about what your rival wore to the school fest and what a fool she made of herself! Decent girls never did that sort of thing.  Now I laugh and join in (albeit tremulously) when my daughters “bitch” about their colleagues and friends from college. You see I am still scared- afraid to repeat to them the sermons I had grown up listening to- scared of the backlash, scared of losing the “cool mom” epithet.

The question of going out with friends without a chaperone (in most cases the ayah) was unheard of- especially if there happened to be a male “cousin” or two around. You had to invent lies and subterfuges just to be able to hang out with your friends and stare like scared rabbits at the boys because you were too scared to talk to them anyway. And even if by some miraculous stroke of good luck you were able to get friendly with a boy, how hard you had to work to keep it a secret! I smile now when I hear girls at 14 and 15  talk about their boyfriends and how important it has become to appear  “committed” or “in a relationship with…” on Facebook. At forty I am still afraid to tell a seventeen year old that at that age it is hard to be “committed” to one romantic interest for life and that it is silly to announce to the world as permanent a fact that is transitory.

As a schoolgirl I had to ask permission to watch TV for half an hour on weekdays. I had to finish my studies beforehand and then watch programs like “Chitrahaar” or “Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi”. I felt privileged because I was allowed to watch Tele-Match, Different Strokes and the odd Hindi movie on Sundays. Now I see children hooked on to either their laptops or i-phones or sitting in front of their TV sets for hours and hours with bowls of popcorn and potato chips, quite lost to the world. I am scared to tell them that living in a virtual world with virtual friends does not help to develop life skills and those virtual relationships pale in the harsh reality of the real world. I am afraid, you see, of disturbing the cocoon in which children hide themselves, hoping that one day the cocoon will burst and a butterfly will emerge.

For those brave hearts that have been able to break away from this cycle of trepidation, I salute your courage. I am happy in the knowledge that when I tell my children “stories” of my childhood and youth they have the wisdom to sift through the chaff and get to the essence of my experiences and, perhaps, learn from them. As for me, I am content to be “I”- timid and accommodating.