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| torilaure |
Posted
on 17-Nov-02 03:19 AM
Here's some food for thought for the great minds at sajha.com to ponder upon in case you haven't already gone through the article. Sorry for posting the whole text instead of the link.The reason is I've had problems before of reaching deadends with old links from The Guardian.
Enjoy reading !!
Amar
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The Generation Gap
Barbara Ellen
Sunday November 17, 2002
The Observer
At the risk of sounding snitty, I can't help thinking that the Generation X, Y, Z thing has been seriously mismanaged. We're going to run out of letters soon, and then what are we going to do? Go back to the beginning of the alphabet again, like they do with number plates? Or maybe go the way of A levels, and start talking about Generation X*. Or X premier league. How about X to the power of 10? It won't wash, will it?
It'll be like Orwell's 1984 all over again. All that build up and fanfare, all that sexy generational tension, and then, when we finally get there, everybody standing around with their hands in their pockets, whistling, trying not to feel short-changed that everything was still the same, and nobody was being dragged off, and tortured with rats in cages strapped around their heads. In the end, 1984 was just another year, and Room 101 became just another television show. All of which makes you wonder - are there such things as generations at all? Or are we just kidding ourselves that any kind of glue (time, culture, destiny) is going to be strong enough to hold this chaotic bunfight we call humanity together? Are we, in effect, indefinable? Or, even worse, can we be defined all too easily, but only in a bad way?
I was thinking this as I read yet more excitable, self regarding clap-trap about how there's this new generation of Young People coming up who aren't going to allow themselves to be tied down like their forebears. They're not going to fall into the birth-school-work-death trap, they're going to have this groovy, flexi-lifestyle thing going on. A bit like an Alex Garland novel, only with a dash of Naomi Klein, and lots of money flying around. Again at the risk of sounding snitty, I think this new generation sound like arrogant snots, who'll only start thinking and talking sensibly when they've been around the block a few times and had several lorryloads of poop kicked out of them. A bit like every generation of Young People in fact. That's the rub with being a Young Person - the time limit. The ever-ticking genetic stopwatch that respects no man, woman, exercise regime, no phial of Botox. All too soon comes the hour, when, no longer young, you have to work out whether you've got a proper life, the life you want. Or whether (horror of horrors) you've been fobbed off with a placebo.
Are we the placebo generation? Just as people on medical experiments unwittingly get fed sugar pills intended to have no effect and wait in vain for the drug to kick in, are there people out there who, without meaning or wanting to, lead lives to no discernible effect whatsoever, acting as mere human wallpaper for others? Do too many of us sit around, inside our lives, detached from reality, daydreaming the days away, wondering when the 'real stuff', the 'life' thing, is going to kick in? Not the relationship we're in, but the relationship we'd love to be in. Not the jobs we've got, but the jobs we want. Not the people we are, the people, those wonderful exciting people, we intended to be.
The placebo existence is like living your life like it were a play you've been given a boring small part in. Indeed, a girl I used to know once drunkenly wailed to me: 'I'm waiting for my real life to begin, but I keep missing the cues.' Now there was someone living a textbook placebo life - dreamy, resentful, miserable as Job, every day a hive of inactivity, dissatisfied on so many levels she had complaint boxes where her nipples should be. I'm not sneering. I've done the placebo thing myself. I know what it's like to mosey through whole stretches of my life as if it were an extremely boring art gallery recommended to me by a friend as a way of getting through a wet Sunday afternoon.
It seems to me that people are made unhappy by two things in life: the bad things that happen to them and the good things that don't. Everything else is just one big placebo. That's how you get people, people who might have expected their lives to be like an Alex Garland novel, walking around with puzzled, disgruntled looks on their faces. Like they've paid good money to sit on a fairground ride that hasn't moved for years. They don't want to stay on, but they're too scared to get off in case it starts again. They don't want to jump into nothing. And yet, poignantly, they remain eternally hopeful that one day life will just magically start moving. Which is probably the most heartbreaking thing about the placebo generation - at some point most of us have to wake up and realise that we'd been given the real thing all along.
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Nov-02 04:34 AM
Torilaure,
Welcome back to Kathmandu and welcome back to sajha.
Do tell us about your long trip to the Far West Nepal.
How are things in that part of Nepal tarai?
My friends in Kailali, Kanchanpur and Banke do not have much good news to share
on the phone whenever they call . . . and I haven't been back to those places
myself for over a year now, though I would love to go back there.
*****
That said, I am struck by the casual use of the phrase "Generation X" in Nepal too.
I have heard the phrase tossed about by Channel Nepal's VJs on air, by some of
HITS FM and other FM stations ko DJs and have spotted the phrase even in some
youth-centric articles in The Kathmandu Post.
[Aside: These days, I am on a mission to find out how Channel Nepal TV, with almost
no commercials and over 8 hours of programming, makes money . . . if it makes
money at all, but I digress.]
In the west, I have seen the phrase "Generation X" contrasted with Baby Boomers.
Gen Xers, being those born between, what, 1960 and 1975? Gen Xers were supposed to be the kids traumatized by their parents' divorces, ironic, suspicious of authority, slackers and yada, yada and yada.
In Nepal, the phrase curously seems to refer ONLY to pretty young things, barely out of their teens, flashing their Everest Toothpaste smiles, chattering away with a mandatory "English medium school" background.
Interesting, no?
Maybe an appropriate nomenclature for Nepali youths could be: Generation Maoists.
Ok, that was a joke.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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| SITARA |
Posted
on 17-Nov-02 05:04 PM
Interesting No?
Interesting YESSSsssssssssssssssssssss! oui c'est vrai!
Throughout my daily promenades to and from the Cyber Cafe I would zealously absorb the terrain. Isolation of the senses, at the pace of my walk was almost impossible. If multitasking of the senses was an art, I had taken it to the pinnacle. Was still struggling walking on the leftside of the road ( mirrowing my directional handicap in my early days in US) as I bumped into jyapu's kharpans, stepped into mud puddles and avoided sisnu ko jharis! Every time I stepped out of home (ignoring my mom's "ye chata boka"), it rained; every time it rained, it poured; every time it poured, I got drenched in the monsoon rain. The rain was what I absorbed, each drop running down my face. Monsoon was what I missed in US.... if I had not known drought, I knew it then by default!
My mom going "katti tyo keta keti haro sanga guff garnu parya?" referring to my ethnographic study (which I conducted....just for the heck of it...ok, well out of curiousity!) of Cyber Culture in Nepal. She had watched me interview the giggling guys and gals who came in droves to the cyber cafe and squandered hours (money too) chatting away to cyberians. During my 6 weeks at the cafe I had watched dramas and melodramas of love, romance, anger, intrigue, betrayals, heartaches and tragedies played out....all in that little room at the cornerstreet. Confined on a chair, eyes glued to the screen and fingers typing at the speed of thought! A whole life lived from a chair in one room!
Generation XYZ? Thought that was us............. The others are house grown mouse potatoes belonging to the MTV generation!
So, one day, I had asked a group of youths what do you think of the political situation? "Khai, thaha chaina...! khai ke ho ke ho!", "hami ta yehi ho, cyber cafe ma aoonchauoon", We can't really do anything about it! "tapain po...you have an option!". So I was there trying to elicit some political comments from these youths from KTM, at best I got was that the bloody maoists were making life miserable!And what of King G, I ask and they'd just shake their head and look away! But going back to chat culture, I was regaled with lively stories of clandestine meetings and plans to meet! An astonishing glimpse of a private universe of MSN chats! (No! I had not been hooked to sajha yet! :).... a super-skeptic of Cyberia then!.....
It was one of those such mornings, as I lazily walked into the cafe, and read Nepal News, I read about the bombing in Deuba's office, somewhere! Turning around I asked if they had heard about it.... they looked at me like ....you kidding? you believe all that crap on Nepal News? A derisive laughter echoed around the room as I tried in vain to read up the news. But guess what ....the answer was "Yah!"
Deflated, pensive and disappointed I slowly dragged my feet back home. Nothing had changed in the terrain; the same pungent smell of wet hilo and poleko makai, cloudy murky weather and torrential rain. Oblivious to the torrential rain, trudged on.... Pass a group of guys sitting on the steps of a chia pasal waiting out the rain.... nothing seemed to penetrate the stupor; oblivious to teasing and taunting cries of "Kasto laaaaaaaaaaaaaaamo kapal, chaak samma!!!!!!!!!" , I walked on....recalling the hangama among the Nepali diaspora...lau bomb padkiyo re!, lau ke bho ni! Emails and international calls made, frantic frenzy to find out the political situation in KTM! The world ABUZZ!!!!!!!!!! Hey did you hear, your city got bombed...read it in the NY Times! Gosh I always thought, need to call my mom...is she ok????????? Goddamn it the blasted card does NOT work!!!!! And here I was...Reality check... the bomb had gone off this morning and nothing happened!.....not a pause in the monsoon rains, not a brake in the MSN chats, not even a blink!!!!!!!............. "HOLA!" "Hello, you are in KTM, YO! not in US of A!"
Back home, I called up my friend and asked him about the bombing...he goes tyahi ta I did not know until I watched BBC and CNN this morning! Another reality check...we depend on foreign news media to tell us what is Credible in our city!
Perhaps, then I understood the skepticism...the shroud of amorphous stagnancy... of a nebulous cloud on a plateau....a spirit reeking of an impasse.... a decaying spirit of youths lured by a universe beyond the physical existence.
An escapism of a psyche maimed by years of disillusionment......! So I don't know about the placebo effect but I do recognize the sedated minds and tranquilized intellects..... An opium den of sorts dense with smoke of inebrieting passivity!
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