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.
