Are you peeing right now?

Saw the powerful Rang De Basanti last night. This blog is inspired by one line in the movie......Aamir tells Sue that we are a generation with one foot stuck in the past and another in the future...which leads us to pee on the present. It invoked a lot of laughter in the theater I was in and thus drowned the punch, but it kind of stuck in my head.

I know that we are indeed a confused generation on a lot of fronts (I am sure that other generations would have felt the same in their days!). This confusion is also perpetuated by the huge pace of change that we are going through. Our teens were for the first time influenced by Cable TV, breakdown of joint family system, reservation issues, Babri Masjid, increased terrorism, corruption being brought to light by media, globalization, imbibing of multiple cultural values....etc,etc,etc

We indeed feel connected to our roots....an example would be that most of us are by and large fairly religious in our own ways and most Hindu youth do follow our cultural ethos around idol worship, I am sure it’s the same for youth of other religions.--------this is our foot in the past.

We are very modern and experimentative....an example would be that despite the respect we would have for our elders, we would like to be open to ideas of how we want to live our life; e.g. men taking up more roles in managing family life and becoming more 'metro-sexual'---------this is our foot in the future.

What bothered me is what are we doing about our present. A lot of youth around me in Lucknow - at the peak of Babri Masjid movement were indeed moved and became fanatical-a-la-Atul in RDB. A lot of us indeed are running towards a job abroad-a-la-junior Singhania in RDB. A lot of us do party hard a-la the DJ of RDB.

I would hate to believe that we are all peeing over our present. Yes, when the momentum of change is huge in a country like ours with all the liberalisation of value systems and the economy at large, we do not know whether we are on the right path.

Sardar Patel told Jawahar Lal Nehru once....We are taking decisions of a high magnitude and they can be interpreted in various ways by generations to come. I just hope that they could see that we didn't mean anything wrong, but were merely driven by the circumstances of our times.....I feel the same way, our generation is kind of stuck in a similar bind, and frankly we don’t think about all this most of the time either.

Lets hope we are certainly not peeing on our present.

By,
Amit Agarwal