I had initiated a small research on my blog a long time ago. On understanding my generation. It was then trigerred by my loss of faith in the “younger generation” after they voted for Smriti Malhotra (of kyunki keta kapoor pays my salary fame) as a potential youth icon on MTV.
Someone recently wrote to me after seeing this post – she is doing her research on the Doordarshan era – to understand how it influenced our social perceptions. Reading her mail, I decided to restart this research again on this blog to see if it gets anywhere.
Here is the idea – partly taken from my earlier post (for which I lost all comments which came in when I transferred my blog to this new url) and edited…
And yes, this is not limited to my generation alone – if you have any interesting thoughts about your growing up years, do share them here…
I have been wading through many Indian blogs…. And came across quite a few Indian bloggers born in the mid-70’s..… What I see as the post-flower, pre-mouse generation…..
I was born in the mid 1970s…. And I am interested in understanding my age cohorts. The concept of age cohorts was highlighted by Rama Bijapurkar a few years ago in discussing cultural changes in India post liberalization. I’ve attempted to loosely explain the concept of age cohort : a group of people (who may be born around the same time frame) who grow up sharing the same social, cultural, political, educational experiences…
The concept of age cohorts is significant because this shared set of experiences determine the values and beliefs they will carry all their life. For instance, the post-war baby boomers in the US.
Coming back to my age cohorts, I am very curious about what experiences we grew up sharing…. That has shaped they way we are today… This idea kept growing when I realized how much my husband and I (who were born in the same year, 1975) had in common even though we grew up in different parts of India. Me in metro, middle-class Madras. And he in small-town AP. There are so many shared experiences we keep exchanging that I wanted to see if others of that time also empathized with this.
So what are these shared experinces?
Internet ? Technology ? : No, I don’t think we grew up with technology. We approached it as grown ups. (I do not consider a job with an IT company and being able to send e-mail as being “techâ€). I am talking about being born internet-savvy, the way kids are today……
Communication ? : We saw the STD booth boom in the country….. is that significant ?
Or is it mobile technology ? Are we the typical sms generation ?
Liberalization ?: Certainly, we witnessed the birth of McD and the re-birth of Coke in India…. Reebok and Ford….. Is this significant ?
The Y2K demand ?
Coalition Governments ? Our youth witnessed the end of single majority parties and the birth of coalition politics….. the shape of things to come and stay…..
Private TV channels ? MTV ? The Bold and the Beautiful ? Quick Gun Murugan ? Cyrus Broacha ? Or is it Giant Robot ?
And where does Doordarshan fit in all this?
The end of Angry Amitabh and the entry of sugary Shah Rukh ?
Or is it a combination of all these ?
I thought it might be fun to share ‘growing up’ with others who grew up elsewhere in the country at the same time……… I do not want to get into a stricter definition of age limits… is too traumatic for me 🙂
The idea being :
1. to understand the events, ideas, values that have shaped my generation (mid-70’s born, the over-20, 30 ish)
2. to experiment with the possibility of blogs as a tool for primary research….. blogs as a tool for expression, blogs as a tool for lobbying….. and now this?
Personally, I would consider this data more credible because participation is voluntary and not coerced or coaxed as in case of conventional research…
This is going to be a sticky post for some time. Do leave your thoughts and spread the word around – hoping to see something interesting come out of this…
Hi Charu
It is an interesting question about what defines an age cohort and what makes them different.
I will give a little anecdote that maybe relevant. I have a good friend from college named Rakhal. He was my first friend from India. He used to take me along to all of the Indian events. That was my first taste of Indian classical music and stick dancing and food as well.
Anyway, Rakhal was definitely a product of the Indira Ghandi period of India. He loved her (figuratively speaking) and was a big believer in socialism. We used to discuss economics and politics until the wee hours. I didn’t agree with his economics but I didn’t let that come between our friendship. At that time, many in the U.S. were extremely paranoid about communism and the USSR (including me) so I was surprised to see someone arguing for socialism and communism and thinking that the USSR might be a role model for his country.
We were very good friends for several years but then we lost touch. I’m bad about keeping addresses and such. I told my wife about this Indian friend I had back 10 years before and she was able to locate him via the internet.
Well, what a difference 10 years made. First he divorced his first wife (who was a good platonic friend also) and remarried and had a son. He got his PhD in Physics but was unable to find a job doing research (I know that feeling) so he went into finance (and has done very well). He moved to Switzerland.
And his economic views have changed completely. He talks about the wonderful change that has come about in India due to the liberalization.
“But weren’t you against free trade and free markets years ago?”
“Oh yeah, But I was brainwashed. You have to understand that everyone was brainwashed by the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty.”
I was born in the *0s, but I remember Giant robot and Stone Boy and Jungle book. But then, since I knew how to play Alladin & Prince of Persia when I was 8, it leaves me out of your survey
80s (I had shift pressed)
What’s with people born in the 70s in India? They seem to be everywhere doing every conceivable thing…
What shaped us? TV? Technology? Movies? Science anyone?
There’s a call for participation at A Time To Reflect. The idea being :
1. to u…
Aahh…that explains it…hitting the big three O and getting all introspective, are we ?
Jokes apart, I think (bring from the born in ’73 group) our generation had its early influence shaped by the idea of centralised planning, of black and white TVs, of Amitabh Bachchan emanating smouldering rage against the establishment…and of haughty pride epitomised by Indira (Kali and Durga archetype rolled into one!)
And suddenly when we were adolescents the world swung the other way, Rajiv was PM, VP Singh, Arun Singh, Arun Nehru were in the cabinet, color TV came to town, Asiad happened…Amitabh went from anger to buffoonery (shahenshah, jaadugar)…Gavaskar scaled the peaks of most centuries and runs, we won the Prudential Cup, and suddenly the markets boomed with liberalisation
Somewhere this swing of the pendulum has given us what I like to call the “Threshold vision”, we are Janus, and we hold dichotomy very well together…we can look back and look ahead, we can straddle both worlds of SMS and good old land line phones…
I see challenges ahead, about our views being fossilised, and of seeing duality in everything, and not seeing that every story not only has two sides but possibly even more now…!
Whew ! That was quite a mouthful!
lets see…..i’m a late 70’s baby….now 30 is right around the corner….:-)
As kids, i think we were out playing a lot more than the present generation……I was out till it was dark, then came home and read, and slept early. TV was on saturdays (dd movie in the evening) and sundays (morning cartoons, evening movie). Later……we got cable when I was in 10th standard or something…..
I got my first email account only when I was in college….(in my second year or something). But by my fourth year, net centers were quite common in chennai, and prices had dropped 🙂
Liberalization happened when in high school….
So, we do straddle two worlds of sorts!
I agree with you on the age cohorts, especially since I too am a 70s blogger. My take on it is that true, we have imageries that we associate with the time that we grew up, but then so does everybody. Of course, we are part of that middle class which grew from the socialism leftover alongwith liberalisation and hence more vocal in this day and age. We really know how we stood in line in a PDS, waited for ages for a telephone, knew a car as an Ambassador or a Premier Padmini and many other instances as much as our parents do.
But since they are not as vocal as our generation on the blogosphere and the new media, we are heard and appear as an omnipresent generation. Having said that I feel that the pervading idea of people like “us” is the triumph of, if I may, capitalism and meritocracy over socialism (or whatever). We also share a “we can do it” attitude possibly because of our recent successes in globalization (IT et al). The third is “a latent pride in our country” and a little bit of “We are like this only”, rather than the previous slightly “colonial mentality”, where we thought we would never amount to anything. Yup, there really is a lot to it.
ravages, Giant Robot and Star Trek. yes…
yes Gautam. sob. but let us not mention it in public again, alright 🙂 threshold vision sounds interesting, let me think so more about it…
Sunil, yes, we did have a lot more outdoor fun than kids do today – apart from tv, I also guess it is because we *had* more outdoor to paly in!
Michael, Neelakantan, sorry my blog swallowed your comments till I spotted and rescued them 🙂
N, is true that all generations grow up with change and each likes to think of itself as unique. as you say, our generation just has more opportunities to express ourselves and the ways in which we have coped and grown up with change….
M 🙂 I wonder what we were brainwashed by – am trying to think of what kind of politics has influenced me…
guess what, I posted my comments here as a separate post on my blog and blogebrity blog says I have rough grammar !
Do you think I have “rough grammar” ….
what would the Indianism be for “rough grammar”….”haryana police grammar”??
Everyone would have passed through the same events that happened to the world. I guess what forms the bond between age cohorts is that they were in a similar place or stage in life when some world events or major changes happened..
I rememeber how the first time I ever watched Doordarshan or TV for that matter was when we bought a TV for the 84 Olympics. I remember the first phone and then the first one you didn’t have to dial in circles. I remember the excitement over the first non-Ambassador car. I remember how Kapil Dev and Roger Binny used to bowl excellent over after over. I remember being stranded at school and terrified when Indira Gandhi died. I remember being in a university dorm trying to console my roommate who couldnt contact her boy friend in NYC when 9-11 happened..
And on Doordarshan, I remember how the only music you could get was Chitrahaar and my mom used to record songs with a tape recorder, and we all had to keep really quiet, or it will record our voices too. And how DD goes into 2 week mournings and you get nothing but some monotous music. May be not part of DD, but I think the sitcom Friends too had a good role in the latter stages of growing up..
So, IMHO, a lot of shared memories make the age cohort bond very strong. And when I get notsalgic about such things and theres a whole lot of people who dont even understand what I am talking about, I realise I am growing old..ahem..mature..
Would love to see the end result of this research. Interesting topic. Will come back.
Everyone would have passed through the same events that happened to the world. I guess what forms the bond between age cohorts is that they were in a similar place or stage in life when some world events or major changes happened..
I rememeber how the first time I ever watched Doordarshan or TV for that matter was when we bought a TV for the 84 Olympics. I remember the first phone and then the first one you didn’t have to dial in circles. I remember the excitement over the first non-Ambassador car. I remember how Kapil Dev and Roger Binny used to bowl excellent over after over. I remember being stranded at school and terrified when Indira Gandhi died. I remember being in a university dorm trying to console my roommate who couldnt contact her boy friend in NYC when 9-11 happened..
And on Doordarshan, I remember how the only music you could get was Chitrahaar and my mom used to record songs with a tape recorder, and we all had to keep really quiet, or it will record our voices too. And how DD goes into 2 week mournings and you get nothing but some monotous music. May be not part of DD, but I think the sitcom Friends too had a good role in the latter stages of growing up..
So, IMHO, a lot of shared memories make the age cohort bond very strong. And when I get notsalgic about such things and theres a whole lot of people who dont even understand what I am talking about, I realise I am growing old..ahem..mature..
Would love to see the end result of this research. Interesting topic. Will come back.
– Surya
(I hate anonymous comments and dint mean to leave one. But somehow my last comment got posted without asking for a name..ah well)
Sorry folks, upgrading from WordPress 1.2 to 1.5 is a freaking nightmare. It’s fixed now.
absolutely Surya, it is about shared memories and experiences – Wednesday Chitrahaar and one movie a week days… and yes, dreadful music for the mourning days – I remember when my dad finaly gave in to the pressure and got cable tv at home was when Zail Singh died and we had nothing on tv but music for days on end…
I am a 1975er and this is my life.
Television : A black and white EC TV, we lived in a housing society where there was only one family who had color television, and God bless them, once a week on sunday morning, these good people used to invite all the neighbourhood snot-nosed brats to watch the sunday morning cartoons and Star Trek on color tv. DD was Ye Jo Hai Jindagi and The World This Week. I remember every woman in my family was infatuated with Pranoy Roy and his distinguished beard. Cricket was my lifeblood. I remember the excitement in getting up at 3:00 a.m to watch the Benson and Hedges series in Australia where they used colored uniforms and white balls for the first time, and when India won the cup and Shastri won the Audi it felt so goood.
Pastimes were simple. Cricket, cricket and more cricket. That was before the fields in the neighbourhod were concretized. Later, Atari video games, then PC games took over. Price of Persia, Wolfenstein and Doom.
Shoes were Bata, Thums up was the only respectable cola, Limca and GoldSpot were soft drink runners up. In between posers came and went : Thrill, Do-It, Campa Cola, etc etc.Lyril was the soap which had the sexy bathing woman ads. The soap that was actually used was Pears.
MTV came and blew me away. I remember our cable operator only had a limited number of working channels and the MTV channel also doubled as the video film channel, so every noon and night, MTV disappeared and was replaced by a Mithun film (cable operator was a Mithun fan). After the film, I sat up awake at night waiting for the cable operator to turn MTV back on. He almost never did.
It took us 8 years to get a phone connection installed. I dont know what the waiting period is today. When our phone was installed, I was so excited I used to call up my friends everyday even though I had nothing to say. Now, my friends are lucky if they get a call from me once a year.
Internet came just in time to apply to the US. It had the ability to stay online 5 seconds at a time and downloading the yahoo main page took 2 minutes.
Well thats it, I could have written a lot more, but gotta get to work.
Reposting from the newer thread
Hi Charu
Nice topic. Took me back to the good old Madras days when petrol was cheaper, DD was the only channel around so you ended up watching every crap Hindi movie on Saturday and all crap Tamil movies on Sundays. Sunday mornings were terrific though; the Walt Disney show, Project Tiger, Indradhanush, Kachchi Dhoop, et al.
Whenever TV was not an option (like through the week), you had to necessarily kill time reading or playing outdoors (going beyond cricket, I think research needs to be done on the waning popularity of indigenous games like 7 stones, Eyes Boys, Paandi, Kings, Gilli-danda, etc).
Since TV exposure was limited, late-night movies were a godsend during my adoloscence;-), unlike today’s kids who are assailed by flesh, flesh and more flesh. Watching movies in the cinema halls was dirt cheap by today’s standards (Rs 8 for regular, Rs 10 for balcony at the Satyam complex and Casino. One had to wait years for the “latest†Hollywood flicks to arrive in town; today when a film’s released in the US, I get to pick up the DVD in the evening.
Before we came down to Madras in ‘84, we lived in Ooty. TV, refrigerators, the beach, blistering summer…all unknown entities. I suppose geography also needs to be factored in. Things that some take for granted may have been novel to others who were raised elsewhere.
***end of rambling***
One last point for today: Today’s kids seem to under a great deal of pressure. I think that would be a key differentiator between Us and Them. Sure many of my classmates were under pressure to become engineers, or learn Carnatic music, but I was lucky enough to have liberal parents. I’d like to know from others what their experience has been.
More later
Ciao
charukesi Says:
August 9th, 2005 at 13.36
Cram, I agree kids now are under great pressure – but wasn’t it the same way with us? or would you feel the pressure is greater now?
(by the way, other responses to this research are at the original post – would be great if you an leave your comment there)
Hi Charu
Of course I think kids are under greater pressure than we were, but as I said, it’s subjective. Perhaps some lucky kids today are under little or no pressure.
One thing I noticed about most replies, including mine, is that the immediate reaction is one of nostalgia without really trying to figure out what makes us, Us. I mean, why have we readily embraced all the tech advancements and the fallouts of liberalisation? Is it because we didn’t have access to it then? Why are we open to the idea of credit cards? Is it because we didn’t get enough pocket money as kids and now want to splurge like there’s no tomorrow? Are we more communal and casteist despite our entrepreneurial spirit and software skills? If we are, why? I think we need to ponder over questions like these to find out what makes us, Us [I think I already said that].
More later
Love
cram
Hi Charu
Serious trouble at your blogsite. My post gets rejected and when I try to post it again, it says I already said that! Imagine! I’ll be back once you have fixed WordPress 1.5 or whatever it is called.
Bye for now
Cram
Cram, hang on 🙂 as I’ve said, disruptive technology is happening on my blog!
and you are right, we have all launched into nostalgia. fond memories. I need to seriously step back from this and think about whether those days were indeed “better”. and find answers to what makes us – this generation – us.
gawker, this what is said on annie’s blog – to me, our growing up time was one of limited choice – whether brands of soft drinks or television channels – so how does that shape the way we are today. I wonder…?
Yeah, sometimes disruptive technology like WordPress can be quite disruptive. Don’t you worry, I am not going anywhere.
Regarding “good old days”, it’s quite difficult to say really. The world is a better and worse place now. It all depends on what parameters are being used. For instance, 20 years back in Chennai I could walk into any home, any hotel, any office and drink water without fear. Today the only water that I consume is bottled; buying water is very much part of our lives in this city. From a water perspective, it’s surely the “good old days”. But when we are talking telecom or computers or the Net, it’s a wired world and it’s wonderful.
My point is: Eff the nostalgia part. Everyone likes to get nostalgic. We talk of the “good old 80s”, my cousin in Kalpakkam yearns for the “good old 70s”, while my Dad thinks the 60s rocked. How do we compare with our parents and uncles, or with elder cousins who were teens in the 70s? Each of us is different in approach, attitude, value systems. I think that’s something we ought to explore. Again, there will be exceptions. Some 80s guy who was ahead of his times, some 60s girl who was too radical (a distant relation comes to mind)…you get the drift.
Another point I’d like to raise is political and social awareness. I would love to know how important it is to people in our group.
More later
cram
Hi Charu
I just called
To say
I blog-rolled you.
Ciao
cram
cram, eeps.
Another point I’d like to raise is political and social awareness. I would love to know how important it is to people in our group.
Any answers, anyone?
(This comment by Annie had vanished from my blog under mysterious circumstances – if any of your comments have too, please let me know)
Technology? Communication? Liberalization? McD, Coke, Reebok, Ford…? Coalition Governments? Private TV channels? MTV? Doordarshan… The end of Angry Amitabh and the entry of sugary Shah Rukh?
Charu – so many questions and so many lifetimes are compressed within all these questions. I’ve already written some hazaar words about growing up with DD, on my own blog, and I’ll try and put some answers down here:
Communications technology was, for me, as basic as pen, paper and postage stamps until I graduated. I remember getting gate passes signed by the nuns in hostel, to go ‘out’ into town to make STD calls to family and friends (female friends… if you called up too male friends too often, the STD booth owner would report you to the nuns).
Mobile phones were an expensive proposition, and a professional necessity, at first. I still have an aunt who keeps phone conversations on my cell phone very short, even if she’s making the call, because she’s got it stuck in her head that I have to pay for incoming calls as well!
Liberalization meant nothing to me until I began reading ‘serious’ books, which was only about three years ago.
Frankly, I didn’t give a damn whether we got Reebok and Coke in India or not. I grew up on Thums Up (which continues to be the more popular cola). I still drink Mazaa mango. And if Mirinda disappears from the market tomorrow, I know we’ll just get a local variation like Gold Spot. Like we say, same difference… ki fark painda hai?
Nike and Reebok are not part of my psyche. Action shoes, to some extent, are… but I am more emotionally attached to Bata, and those semi-branded white canvas shoes that could be washed and painted over.
And you know what? McD is convenient in terms of knowing what to expect – from the decor to the food to the uniforms and prices – but nobody I know ever misses a McD. Nobody from my generation. We’ll go and eat there, but take it away and put something else there and it doesn’t ‘matter’ to us. The Irani cafes matter to me. The old coffee houses matter to me. Rovers in Lucknow mattered to me. To see it change, for the worse, hurts. To not see the familiar old owner hurts. McD… when people throw stones at it, my only concern is ‘I hope the staff wasn’t hurt’. Who knows who owns it? Who knows who serves it? Nameless, faceless – McD. Take it away and nobody will miss it.
And I still love Amitabh. Shahrukh too. So does my mother and so do a few grandmothers I know. There isn’t that much of a difference in what these two represent (though there’s a huge difference in talent and style, etc). Don’t think anything fundamental has changed there. What has changed is the films themselves. Amitabh wasn’t a rebel without a cause. If he was an angry young man, the system gave him cause enough. Shahrukh is not a rebel. He is an NRI/ college kid/comfortable businessman/ancient king who escaped the system. He represents that side of the fence. Our films are now made that side of the fence… does that make sense?
Hi Charu
Blame it on the 80s:-))) After all what’s the 80s without Stevie Wonder? Some of the songs that were superhits then seem so corny now. That’s why I’ve decided to stick with the blues. Music for all generations.
Ciao