It is universal, apparently immortal too, to blame the young for not learning form the old. Each senior generation finds it hard to figure out the inability on the part of the young to read the old right and get their lives straight. Education to romance, careers to commerce, driving to digitalising, the areas of disagreement are as multiple as there are passions and prejudices. When there are those who have already taken the path and ready to look back and take stock, to comment, analyse and articulate, it is pretty simple for the young to learn from it. How come they don't do that ? When the been-there-done-that species of the past is ready to educate the ones getting ready to arrive, why do they turn their backs on it and decide to go it alone?
Think that it happens. That the young have made a manual of what the previous generations have done and been doing, and have schematised the rights and the wrongs, and have decided take on life fully loaded with these insights, how different will lives be? The so-looking-road more travelled by with trodden tracks and signposts, legends and markings, skeletons and shed skins, what will be the nature of the lives it prepares the young ones to? Will they traverse the highway to a future where all is rosy, building on the gains or otherwise of those who walking in to their long days journey into the night? A young journey sans pitfalls and hidden mines, a path which has anaesthetised troubles, dredged of the mud of madness?
From the lesson of the elders that peace is more valuable, productive than war, what will the young make? If they make a principle of it, and keep off from fighting among themselves, will it be good for them? Imagine a hoard of utopian children in a peace that defies understanding! How effectively, undisturbingly will they rework our attitude to what childhood means? If learning involves learning by doing, if true learning has to be founded on experience, then will that learning they have picked from their seniors stick? Will it wear off?
If we pass on to them what we have learned from the corruption in public life to them, what will they make of it? When they begin to take to heart the mammoth stories of deception and treachery that the ruling class have indulged in, what lesson will they learn from it? Will they decide to weed out the corruption or will they keep off it? The almost insurmountable piles of ill gotten wealth and power that the seniors flaunt before the young, will it teach them to take to their routes or to head a lonesome track or to be amply cynical?
If the young learn, pretty easy and damn quick, that age can wither and custom stale the non infinite charm of the body, will it turn them ignore their bodies and appearances? When they learn that appearances are more often than not deceptive, will they begin to care a fig for that? If so, what will be the world like? A generation which will be unkempt from the word go? A surrender even before the fight has begun? If the young learn from the old that chances have played an incredibly huge role in making the world what it is, will the young give into drifting? What will be the place for the corporate rant of grabbing the opportunities, single minded devotion, Steve jobs like insight and that blah blah? If the young learn that for every Gates who made it high there are thousand who didn't, where will that take them to?
On the flip side, if the young chooses to make a religion of the work hard motto of the seasoned and ripe seniors, and get down to work like the proverbial asses, will that lead to the making of the promised land? If they learn that satisfaction is what rally matters and that will be hard to get hold of, what will the young look ahead to? Where will they anchor themselves and their thoughts? A generation which says no to fast food, a generation which cuts TV time dramatically, a generation which rises early and hits bed late, a generation which takes exercises to the heart, a generation which keeps of sugar and fat, a generation which attempts digital celibacy... How will that be?
Or should each one learn it afresh? Each generation going through and picking it ones way? Imagine a generation which has really taken stock of the past, learned thoroughly what the seniors did with their lives, how inspiring will that be to them to pick up from where the elders have left off?
The answer is blowing in the wind ......
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