Have people really changed with times? Or Have the times changed?

These days we find several posts that talk of the good old days where people were concerned about each other, shared each other’s joys and sorrows. The posts remind us of the child hood days when we were unlike the children of today, of parents who had time for their children, of strangers who were kind and helpful, where we had real friends unlike today where we have more virtual friends.

In short this comparison is to make us realise that people were good in the past and those days were the best days. And today people are selfish, youth are more self-centred, children are indifferent and rude, they don’t respect the elders nor do they have the helping nature that children earlier had. All that the youth, kids and even adults are absorbed into today is the modern day gadgets that keeps them occupied in a world of their own whereby they are detached with the real world and real people.

Recently I read a blog by Kelly flanagan forwarded to me by my niece and it set me thinking. The blog was about how kids have more to teach to us especially some lessons of life which we have conveniently forgotten smug in our self confidence and complacency.

He is right, I realised. We do have so much to learn from kids if only we take some time to contemplate. We, the older generation who tend to dismiss off today’s generation as ‘artificial’ beings. At the same time we also dismiss even the adults who have changed with the modern times and have become callous and selfish.

Early this year in the month of February, I lost my brother. He left behind 2 boys aged 14, 13 and a girl aged 11. The children were for some days numb with sadness and found a great difficulty in coming to terms with the death of their father.

However, the boys had several friends in the neighbourhood and these boys did their best to draw out my nephews and include them in their games. And on two occasions they also took my nephews out to a bakery and on another day to a tiffin centre just to cheer them up and treat them to their favourite dishes and snacks from their pocket money.

And the school management where they studied delegated a group of female teachers to come to our house to offer their condolences. And the teachers had brought with them a letter from the management offering their condolences.

The eldest boy studied in another school. And the director of that school, a young man was not in India but his parents came to our house to offer their condolences to my brother’s wife and his children. And when the director came back to India after a couple of months he waived off the fees for the coming academic year which was the last year in school for my nephew.

 I realised people have not really changed. Or if they have, not all people, not all kids, not all youth have changed.

If anything has changed it is the perception, the circumstances and environment that forces people to become callous, indifferent, rude, selfish and what not.

I not only felt overwhelmed by all these actions of the people connected to my brother’s family but I went down memory lane.

I was maybe 11 when my father died. And apart from my class teacher who consoled me when I went to school after a couple of days, no one else did. No other teacher, no classmate or the management had anything to say to  me leave apart coming home to offer their condolence to my mother.

However a kind lady in the neighbourhood took me and my little niece to her house and gave us chapati to eat and tea to drink. Though at that time I did not realise why she was feeding us. But now I do.

So have times really changed? Have people changed? Have they become good now? Or were they good back then? It isn’t really about time. It is about people. Time is only a concept we human beings perceive.

People can be good or bad whenever wherever they want. It has nothing to do with times then or times now.

Time changes, it cannot be constant. So do people, either for good or for bad. You cannot escape change but you can certainly decide how you want to change.