Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

April 24, 2015

Some thoughts on the mails on how folks born in x-y range are the best

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 1:04 AM

I am sure that you have received a lot of emails/sms’s/WhatsApp messages that claim that folks of a particular age range were the best and did the most with our lives as opposed to people in earlier/later generations who couldn’t have possibly done anything worthwhile. Today I got this forward and I thought about it and decided to share it and my thoughts/comments on it.

> We, the people born between 1950-1989, are the blessed ones…
> We are d awesome people. Our life is a living proof……….

Ok, if you say so. I am not sure what made us the blessed ones but fine if you think so. I think that is just conceited and egoistical. You might be awesome, but you sure don’t know how to spell or write.

> We were never treated like a pack of animals to carry our books to school.

Hmm, I distinctly remember carrying a lot of books to School. In fact we had 7 classes every day so I had to carry 7 books, 7 notebooks and other assorted stuff to class. I think you have forgotten about the thick math & Physics books that we all had to carry to school everyday.

> While playing and riding bicycle, we never bothered to wear helmets.

I don’t think you need to wear a helmet even now while playing in the field (unless you are playing american football). Being safe is not a bad thing. Unless you are one of the idiots who think that it is cool to ride bikes/scooters without helmets?

> After school time we played until its dusk but never watched t-world (TV) by locking up ourselves in a room.

I know enough people who did that (watched TV all day) when we were kids and enough kids nowadays who spend their evenings in the field, or in the pool, or up a climbing wall etc etc. Don’t generalize.

> We played only with our real friends, not with NET friends.

What constitutes a ‘real’ friend? Actually, before you answer that let’s take a look at What a friend is… Dictionary.com defines a friend as “a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard. “. You can be attached to a person even when you don’t meet every day. Or do you mean that anyone you can’t meet on a regular basis is no longer considered a friend. If that is true then anyone not in the same city as you automatically is demoted to an acquaintance.

I have friends whom I met online and then became really close to and after we met up in real life we stayed good friends. Just because you are not comfortable with maintaining friendships in mediums other than Face-to-Face, doesn’t mean that those relationships are any less meaningful.

> If we ever felt thirsty, we used to drink tap water but never searched for bottled water.

Ok, however the water was usually filtered. which is what we still do for the most part.

> We never got ill even after sharing the same juice with four friends.

You still don’t. (Unless one of them had the cold/flu)

> We were never put on weight even after eating plate full of sweets and rice everyday.

Umm… Not true. It depended on how much exercise you got playing, which is still the case. Kids who are active don’t get fat, those you are not get fat.

> Nothing happened to our feet even after roaming bare foot.

Not true. You could get blisters, get a thorn. Just that when that happened our parents didn’t freak out and try to wrap us in cotton when that happend.

> We never used any health supplements to keep ourselves healthy.

Speak for yourself. Most kids I knew got to take a ton of Vitamin tablets/cod liver oil etc on a periodic basis. Though we didn’t take as many antibiotics, those have gotten a lot more prevalent nowadays.

> We used to create our own toys and play with them.

Kids still do that. Watching my nephew and niece I see that for them anything is a toy. e.g. for my nephew a screwdriver is the worlds best toy. My niece loves playing with my watch and glasses. Older ones create whole worlds using games (both online and in real world). A few days ago I watched a bunch of kids play Lava Lava (the game where the entire floor is Lava and you die if you touch it).

> Our parents were not rich, they never ran behind money and wealth. They just searched for and gave only love.. not any worldly materials.

What makes you think people in past generations weren’t after money? If they were not then we would have a lot more ascetics in the world, instead we got Harshad Mehta, Chara Scam’s, 3g, 2g scams etc etc (these were done by folks our parents age).

> We stayed nearby to them so that they can communicate with us. Just one word by them was enough to communicate. hence we never required any mobile phones to communicate.

Just because people stayed near their parents didn’t mean they communicated, you can stay in the same house and not talk or stay in a different country and still talk daily. Which is why so many properties ended up getting divided. If I am so close to my parents that I need just one word to communicate with them, then I can do that over the phone as well. I don’t need to be in the same room to do that. I talk to my parents on a daily basis (for the most part) over the phone and I know people who haven’t talked to their parents in years even though they are in the same city.

> We never visited doctor when we got ill but the doctor visited us during our illness.

They still do. Just costs a lot more. 😉

> We never used to share our emotions just by emoticons in mobile phones.

Ok. I give you this one.

> We used to listen to the truth and voice of our conscience and used to write those things only in the letters, hence we never used to change our words.

Oh really? You mean to say that no one in our generation told lies, or cheated anyone? If you think that then I have some real estate that I need to sell that you would find very interesting.

> We never had cellphones, DVDs, Play stations, XBoxes, video games, Personal computers, internet, chat but we had many real friends.

So do kids in the current generation. You can have friends even when you have all the gadgets in the world as they are not mutually exclusive.

> We used to visit our friend’s home uncalled and enjoyed food with them. We never had to call them and ask their permission to visit their home.

Umm.. you still don’t have to. I see my cousins, nieces and nephew’s walk over to their friends place to play daily without having to ask for permission. At my sister’s place I see Vir’s friends over all the time and Vir is at their place just as frequently.

We come up with these lists to show how much better off we were as kids but to me they tell a different story. The lists tell me that our parents did an awesome job in raising us and maybe we are not doing that great a job of raising the next generation. If the kids today are anti-social (in your eyes) or don’t go out to play then they are not to blame. I blame us (the parents/previous generations). The kids will do what they get trained to do.

We are the ones who freak out when the kids go out and don’t get back home exactly on time. We are the ones who tell kids not to play in front of the house. We are the ones who protect our kids to the extent that they don’t know how the real world works.

Relax, stop protecting the kids so much. Give them some leeway to make mistakes as that’s how they will learn. If you remember we made our fair share of them, so now it’s time for the next generation to make their mistakes and learn from them. Let the kids know that you are there for them if they need you but give them some space as well and you will see them blossoming.

Well this is all for now, I need to crash for the night so will write more later.

– Suramya

1 Comment »

  1. […] it out using text from two of my Blog posts from the past. The first one was using the text from Some thoughts on the mails on how folks born in x-y range are the best. According to […]

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