When I grow up...

Right, I am a millennial and a proud one at it. This is how I look at my values. These decrees are updated periodically, validated and eventually cast in stone by my contemporaries via social media pages. The toolkit is broadcasted far and wide for all to bow in obedience, hoping to achieve a New World Order with all netizens thinking in one single unwavering frame of thought.

Paradoxically, I am supposed to think of myself; but only about myself. It is only me that mattered. The others are here to help me out. After all, what are people for if not to help the others around? Whether I will help others does not come into the equation, as I must first take care of myself. After all, I have only one life -me. I am not going to give this up for anything else. I have to explore the extent of my true capabilities.

It is not my fault that I think I must not fail in my every endeavour. Do not blame me for that. You were the first to praise me in my childhood whenever I bungled up. You still gave me a medal when I came out last in a competitive race. 

Filial piety, what filial piety? Is it not enough for me to deal with all the unsavoury traits you gave me, forever trapping me in your shadows? I cannot even take care of myself in this increasingly competitive world. No thanks to you too that my generation has to endure all the environmental degradation you gave us to mend. 

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A utopia in a woke world?

Encanto (2021)

Director: Jared Bush and Byron Howard

Something is unsettling about this Disney animated musical. Sure the animation, the colour, and the music are spellbinding; it is the story that makes me think.

When I overanalyse the story, the more I feel it must surely be a wet dream for the proponents of the woke culture (or nightmare, depending on how you look at it). Colombians running from their motherland from atrocities (which they think were perpetrated by the US) were ushered in almost magically into a land of magic. In this magical land (the US, maybe), they were all given special powers (read special preference) to help each other in a Colombian only community. Perhaps others (non-Colombians) do not matter.

The next generation all grow up expecting to have special treatment - all the siblings and their siblings. They feel entitled to be treated differently. They deserve the magic that their predecessors received, even though their circumstances were different.

When these doors are not opened, they feel cheated and refuse to do their duty to the community. The community also needs to be blamed, for when someone reminds them of the rotten system and their imminent collapse, he is labelled as a traitor, an outcast, and put in cold storage. For a bit of semblance of sanity to prevail, the whole rot has to be purged away for new building blocks to be put in.

Maybe in not so your face manner, this musical tells the story of a matriarch who flees Colombia to be saved by a magic candle that builds a house for them and nurtures her children and grandchildren. The family and the rest of the community surrounding the shape-shifting mansion just make merry and dance all day through, unaware of the decay in the house's structure. The protagonist, a teenage girl who does not get her dues, goes on a crusade to find the real gift that she duly deserves.

Of course, it is not like that. Mind my wild imaginations! Did I mention the many biracial couples and the fleet of seemingly clueless and docile male characters? They form the woke narrative - payback time for all the toxic masculinity over the generations!

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The new norm?

That a look at these two Presidential debates, the first one was in 1960 between JFK and Nixon, whilst the second one happened recently in the year 2020. See the vibes surrounding the two debates. Without a shadow of a doubt, there is much professionalism and decency in the former whereas in the latter we only see crass behaviour and lack of common decency.

In our formative years, we were taught that to listen and to let another to speak are common decencies. Only the immature and ill-mannered interferes one's conversation we were told. We also trained to fight facts with facts, to argue it out like gentlemen in decorum, without being personal or hitting below the belt.

Somewhere along the way, while we were napping, a lot of things changed.

The '90s brought in the internet culture and work ethics of the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Workers were expected to dress down to work. Work time needs to be flexible, they said. Jobs is famously known to walk around bare feet and is said to stretch out his naked feet on the office tables whilst discussing work matters with his contemporaries. Seniority went out of the window when open office concept came to being.

Smartphones did not make people smarter. It only built them a personalised echo chamber for them to wallow around in the sweetness of their pixelated self. The 'self-generation' that did not give two hoots about the feelings of the about the other morphed. Under the cloak of anonymity, they would swashbuckler their thoughts with the sorcery of keyboards which are not their views actually but mere parroting of the hidden hands of the cabal.

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Are we there yet?

Looks like the generation that enjoyed the “are we there yet?” clip from Shrek 2! are all grown up. Now that they are cooped up in lockdown, they complain that they are bored. They keep whining when the movement control order will end.

This is the generation that could not be left to themselves to interact and create games among themselves. Their parents had to arrange party games to keep them occupied. Some caregivers kept their kids glued to the TV for babysitting or kept them busy nibbling on junk food and gulping soda.

As if that the whole Universe was conspiring against them, in rolled the gaming devices and the world wide web network to quench the desire for instant gratification. Their wants, desires or any kind of squirms were met with a wave of fingers which almost looked like a sleight of hand.

The opposing forces of Nature, it seems, are fighting back. They want to impress upon the millennials that not everything can be fixed by their soccer mums. It is what it is. Even though satisfied that they would be left uninterrupted to their own digital devices, they yearn to hang around idly at the overpriced and overhyped eateries. 

The elders can tell them that it is a form of national service for them; that it is nothing compared to their grandparents who had to don military fatigues bearing artillery to scourge the tropical hinterland, it is all fairy tales to them.

They can be told of the single year without a summer in 1816 when Europe was frozen and how that misadventure created a brand-new genre which is incidentally one of their favourites. Without Frankenstein and Vampyre, their idol Robert Pattinson and Twilight would not have had their breaks. 

Meanwhile, are we there yet? Have we traversed the peak and descending path of the standard distribution curve of the Gaussian graph?

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Appearance not substance

I do not want to see the skyline. I want to know how the

background looks with me as the subject. It is all about me, 

myself and I. 

From a group of people who thought that peeking into a mirror was looking at the devil itself and that posing in front of a camera would drain a person's soul, we have come a long way. Our generation is easily the one that has the most access to how they look. Rather than posturing at their better side, they seem to want to see every angle of the body. They yearn to have the perfect photo-friendly display of the best that they have to offer. They want to be forever in portrait mode. Every passing moment is a potential Instagram moment, and they must be ready. They do not want to be caught in an awkward pose, opening the mouth too wide, with the hair unkempt or even with a face incongruent to the camera's angle. 

Their every second of their existence must be an 'insta' worthy moment!

Don't even preach that inner beauty is more important and that one has to be beautiful on the inside or that beauty is skin deep. It is easier to make a conclusion by perusing the outside. Exploring inner attraction is too tiring and cumbersome.

These are some of the thoughts that went through my mind as I witnessed a few events recently. Two of them were life-altering academic achievements, while the other was festival merriment. It seems to me that well-wishers who attended the function were there to sort of mark their attendance by pixellating their presence forever. Whether they were there to genuinely extend their felicitations is another question. Their preoccupation was to take pictures of the host in different combinations of friends and relatives like in a round-robin football match to pick out the team with the most goals. In this case, the person who appears most photogenic. Do they not realise that saying that one is photogenic means that he or she is ugly in real life but deceptively appealing in pictures.  

Amma used to say, "This world is about appearance, not substance. But with time, beauty will decay, but the matter will withstand the test of time."

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no bad ending...

The latest season of Games of Throne has ended. How do the die-hard fans respond? They totally went ballistic, demanding a re-write of the script and re-shooting of the whole season. The viewers, mostly from Generation-Y and millennials, were brought up believing that they can have everything their way. All they have to do is ask. Nobody is a loser. Living under the umbrella of their helicopter parents who rewarded mediocrity, for them, it is their right. Win, they must, they think they get away with murder. For them, it is their way or the highway. There is only one way, their way. And they want not now but yesterday. What really matters is their desires. Others can just get lost. And they have just the perfect way to air their grievances, their dirty linen to air, in public domain.

We have to understand that not everything in life is under our control. We sometimes cannot even control ourselves. Definitely, creative juices cannot be contained. Just because you pay for the media control, it does not mean you control the storyline. Come to think of it, they already have that. It is called interactive TV. It is like a multiple choice response to how the viewer wants the story to progress!

Nietzche rightly predicted that Man of the future will spend a vast amount of time in appreciating, not the great feats of mankind but at their trivialities. Maybe like hunting for Pikachu monsters or keeping up with the Kardashians.

This evolution is inevitable when the day to day issues, like the next meal, basic amenities and education are available at will. As it is human nature to be fickle and bicker, to keep the neurons firing, they ponder on irrelevant issues like choosing the right eye-shadow or eavesdropping into others' private lives just for the kick of it!

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