I have grown up hearing history or reading it. I have always been at the receiving end of accounts of glory, horror, hardship and greatness. I spent a very trouble free childhood. I never had to face or even understand the concept of hardship. I was brought up with a healthy respect for our condition and the awareness of suffering, but I never suffered. In a broader sense I was born in a stable country going through a longer than normal period of constant growth and high promise.
During my childhood, we as a family had to deal with many issues related to ourselves and our position, but there was never anything we had no control over. We lived through some rough times for Bombay as it was then. We saw the riots; we were there during the serial bombings of 93. But curiously, those events seemed far away and not capable of touching us. (Of course I now realize that was because I was too young then. Too young to really grasp horror).
I went through the education system at a time when a new understanding for alternative and exciting fields was beginning. Where parents and children alike were grasping at new careers and better and more efficient ways to mine their talent and interest. I was fortunate enough to be allowed to follow my own heart. Experimenting, hitting cul de sacs sometimes, but having the luxury to learn and retry. I sometimes underestimate this power I had back then. This shield that allowed me to blunder as only a young adult can and yet be able to rise again and prove myself. All allowing me to be who I need to be.
I was never oblivious of my surrounding pain and suffering, I just never had to face it. I could be and was an audience to life's dramas. Without caring about or understanding the implications to my life. I was as carefree and happy go lucky as an audience at a Shakespearean tragedy. My tears were just those shed in sympathy by an audience.
No more. No more have I got this luxury. No more can my generation even think that they are protected. Our jobs are at risk, our lives are at risk. Maybe it’s the frantic urgency of a 24 hr update media frenzy, but it has left me and my fellow people in a state of extreme vulnerability. Our very lives are threatened. I am no longer a listener to the woes of generations before me, but a sympathizer of people my age. I don't have to go to history books to know what a war is like, I just have to turn on the television or even just talk to my boss, who's son is in the Navy.
I don't have to look at grainy black and white photos of people standing in soup lines, I just have to look down the corner of my street. I no longer have to try to imagine the fear of people living under constant threat, I can hear it in the voices of people I care about. I now witness history. Every day, new numbers regarding the state of the global economy. The legacy of the blunders of the past now unfolds at my feet. Careers collapse around me. Companies, giants are falling.
Not only the manmade disasters but the natural disasters come knocking at my door. I saw people swim through floodwaters to get to the basement of my building. I watch the Weather Channel in awe as a hurricane with storm winds stretching for 500 miles threatened to hit the Gulf of Mexico.
My entire generation of people and I have come to face these things which were once fabulous beasts of fantasy. What I couldn’t decide was whether this is a fate unique to my generation, or whether all generations feel this way when they get to be my age. After all when WWII came knocking around, when the Berlin Wall fell, even when the dawn of our Independence and the disaster of our Partition arpproached, there was a generation of twenty to thirty year olds wondering whether such things could be reality.
I finally understand the real nature of what later becomes history. I have figured out that you need to get to a certain age to really do so. I have finally understood the meaning of growing up, or rather of coming of age. You come of age when you understand that not only are you the one impacted by historic events, you are the center of historic events, the cause and the victim all at once. The complexity of the world hits you, the interconnectedness becomes apparent. One understands, we understand, that for all its beauty and its flaws, we have finally inherited the Earth.
