I live at home now, which for me is synonymous to living with a lot of elders who consider our generation impatient, impulsive and intolerant. Okay its not as stifling as it looks, its just that too many people who are part of my ‘home life’ have an opinion on too many things they are not part of. Maybe its time some one from our generation owned up to these accusations, so I decided to make the attempt. Yes, I totally agree we are impatient, we want things to be done quickly, we want the whole world to move at whatever pace we can manage just so that we don’t have to wait for anything. But is that such a bad thing? If people had the time and patience to wait for Blaise Pascal’s machine to churn out the results to simple maths and then re-feed those results to do slightly more complex math until the most complex of operations took days together then maybe we would not have today’s computers that finish the job in milliseconds. Same logic re-applied to faster and better automobiles (and rising condom sales :P).
Yes, We are an impulsive generation, we instinctively rush to the scene of an accident and do our part to help, when floods occur, we don’t just ‘feel bad’ for the victims, we make proactive efforts towards alleviating their suffering. We don’t take shit standing down(well most of us), and believe respect needs to be earned before its deserved. We will go out late in the night and stay out past midnight because its actually fun doing so, not because we impulsively want to do what we have been told not to do.
And most ironically, ‘intolerant us’. So, is it a display of generations of tolerance that we have oppressed minorities and a well-in-place and god-darn rigid caste system? What good is tolerance if all it has done was help people remain silent as the nation was looted for centuries, by foreign hand or our own. Had the Bhagat singhs and Gandhis of yore been tolerant, we would still be a british colony(which I guess doesn’t seem like such a bad thing considering the UPA government). We are just the same. We are truly intolerant, but our intolerance is not towards elderly gospels, or religious freedom or the right to equality. Our intolerance is not towards giving respect or time or second chances. Our intolerance is towards those wrongs that we can right. Our intolerance is towards corruption, towards political drama, towards oppression, racism and a hundred other evils that threaten to tear apart the fabric of our society. Our intolerance is towards the narrow mindedness rooted with the minds of the previous generations. Our intolerance is towards those unfulfilled political campaign promises and the unsavory lives the nation’s poor have to lead. Now, is that really such a bad thing?
