You just have to look around you in a bus or a train — especially on a long-distance journey. Everyone is occupied and everyone seems to be doing the same kind of thing. They have earphones plugged in and are busy on their cell phones. They could be engaged in office work or in catching up on family news, they could be listening to music or playing games or just checking out the best route by which to get where they want to go.
On one such trip not so long ago, when two generations of our family were travelling together by train, the older generation, expectedly, was reclining and reading or completing crossword puzzles; the younger generation was busy with their all-in-one superpowered cell phones that performed services for them that the older lot could not even begin to understand. In their own little worlds, with earplugs and glassy eyes, those young adults had to be prodded and nudged at mealtimes or when the ticket examiner came to check on us.
Suddenly, one member of the superpowered generation was heard saying earnestly to his mother: “What a sad childhood you must have had! Imagine not being connected with the world — not knowing what is happening everywhere as it happens, not being able to communicate with your friends and colleagues within seconds, and worse than that, imagine not having music wherever you go, not being able to play video games ... How on earth did you entertain yourselves?’
His mother and all of us of a similar age were affronted — don’t all of us like to believe that we have had an ideal childhood? — and read him a lecture on all the simple pleasures of our times. How we had made do with what we had and also created things we didn’t have — home-made kites, board games, word puzzles.
“But what did you do without technology? You couldn’t carry your library with you like this,” (he waved his Kindle), “and how long could you play board games and do puzzles or play marbles and seven tiles ... you were a seriously deprived generation.”
The rest of us gaped, unsure that we had heard right. We — the deprived generation? We of the wide-open spaces, the abundance of wildlife in our backyards, the trees of every shape and size to climb and pluck fruit from, the short school hours, the long playtimes, the absence of tuition and special classes and highly competitive percentages ... we who had long bemoaned the restricted and restrictive lives that our children were forced to lead in cities and in apartment blocks with everyone their age busy preparing for entrance exams to college when they were not yet in high school.
We were deprived?
We tried to explain what fun a simple game of marbles was — and how winning someone else’s stock was a feat that called for celebration — and another round of the game. We pointed out the camaraderie that was fostered by an energetic game of seven tiles that required no special expertise, just a lot of enthusiasm, thus allowing us to rope in anyone who passed by. We brought out the negotiating skills we learnt as we decided which music we should listen to collectively — or which movie we should all go out to watch.
Of course, there was no way he could understand the joy of those animated sessions where often someone came to blows, someone ended up in tears, but for the most part, we learnt to ‘adjust’ .
“We don’t have to waste time wondering about other people’s likes and dislikes,” he said, returning to what seemed to us to be his walled-in status. “We just need to plug in and we are done. No fights, no arguments ...”
“ ... and no fun!” we chorused.
Cheryl Rao is a freelance journalist based in India.
