I began to think about my generation, referred to as Generation X after a recent visit to the hospital with my mother where we nursed her back to good health after a brief illness. As grateful as we are for modern medicine and longevity, somewhere inside me I mourned the passage of time as it has become more evident than ever before. For me, she will always be the young woman in her colourful saris, with big bright eyes, an aster in her long plat, listening to Begum Akhtar and introducing me to literature. This image of her is preserved in posterity because nothing looks the same anymore. The world has galloped towards change at an alarming pace and left my generation at the crossroads of several different eras. For those of us who were fortunate to know our grandparents, I realize now as I reminisce that it was a privilege to be influenced by those born at the beginning of the 20^th century. We didn’t anticipate then that we would raise a family in a new millennium or that it would take a Herculean effort to traverse these disparate worlds. Also, more than previous ones, my generation seems to be the one who is grappling with an older generation that grows feeble and a younger generation that refuses to mature.

In our childhood, exemplary behaviour was all around us. We lived with the residual aura of leaders like Gandhi and Vivekananda, the cinema of Bimal Roy and Raj Kapoor with its holier than thou heroes and heroines and the secularist and liberal ideologies that dominated most of the world in the post war period. We sub-consciously imbibed the values they practiced and stand witness to a bygone time, wisps of which waft through our minds fleetingly as we interact with a generation of youngsters who think they know exactly how the world functions. We watch from the chasm between the old and the new and live between ancient dogma and a new kind of intolerance that parades as sensitivity.

Back in the day, everyone just allowed a previous generation to have their own cultural ecosystem. There were grandmothers doing their own thing in every home. They were either bickering with the staff or sitting with rosary beads, completely uninvolved in the family drama until a social gathering required their presence and when they graced centerstage to command respect.  Everyone had their own families and then their families so the younger generation couldn’t be bothered with correcting their outdated ideas. Also, respect for one’s elders towered over all other emotions. The expression of love was not a familial feeling but a romantic one. Families demanded fear, respect and loyalty. Love could only be found in prose and poetry. If you loved your father, you obeyed him. You didn’t say ‘Love, you, Dad,’ at the end of every phone call and then go out clubbing at his expense. You stayed home, helped out and maintained boundaries.

Yet, unconsciously so, my parents’ generation expects to be treated in the same way that they had treated their parents. Even today, despite all the brainwashing via pop culture, they think nothing about asking a young woman why she isn’t married or a young person how much they earn. I don’t have the same privileges. My children take a second to smirk and sigh over a politically incorrect statement of mine. I have to adhere to both sides. Like I said, I’m stuck between the past and the present almost as though the world decided to swiftly move past the phase where I could define my identity. The time when I experimented with blue eye shadow and wore shirts with shoulder pads passed in the blink of an eye. We didn’t enjoy the years of dating and dancing because our focus was always on a goal, either marriage or career and preferably both. Most of us didn’t know what it was like to flit in and out of relationships or jobs. We went from following in our parents’ footsteps to keeping pace with a world that was already preparing for the future. As a result, when I look at myself in the mirror, I realize that I bear more resemblance in style and fashion to my children than my mother or grandmother. It’s no surprise then that my generation went from being parented by parents to being parented by children.

We were largely at fault because we went from revering age-old wisdom and experience to revering youth and novel ideas. Yet, we are not old enough to be indulged and not young enough to be cool. In order to hold on to our parents and our children we decided to become tolerant. We are happy to talk to an elderly person about customs and tradition and a young person about breaking the same customs and traditions if they so please. We look after our elders but we don’t expect to be looked after by our children. We cherish the memories of sifting through telephone diaries, making trunk calls and receiving telegrams. Even so we know how to download documents, make reels and use apps. We don’t know which is graceful; growing old or staying young so we seem to have settled for something in between. We try to hold on to tradition but we embrace modernity. Yet, it is through this transition, this hotchpotch of ideas that a new more balanced world will appear. Even though Generation X has had to bridge the gap, it has learned a valuable lesson that can be passed on. In order to maintain peace and decorum, we need to stop thinking in extremes. We don’t mind being judged by our elders for our digression from old norms and we don’t mind our kids scoffing at us for adhering to many of them. We have realized that the key to harmony does not lie in being understood by everyone. The key to harmony lies in understanding others.