Difficulty of being you (me?) - III

The story clearly turns towards me, my analysis and my life here - hence the question in the parenthesis.

As I delve into this, so called difficulty of being myself - or to put it more precisely, the guilt of being myself at the cost of someone else's disapproval stems from one big phenomenon - Liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991 - somehow it hastened the disintegration of joint families into nuclear families, gave us the choice between Pepsi and Coke, took away our summer outdoor days to "monopoly", "life" and "barbies", from the family dramas of DD to the "wonder years" of Star TV, made extinct the mammoth called Ambassador cars, exchanged home tailored dresses with designer labels...it kept changing us with the freedom to choose - pizzas, coffee shops, designer labels, international brands, private colleges, laptops, cell phones...eventually we got used to choosing everything for ourselves - including how to live...

Yet, the generation before us was blind to it...still stuck in their 80's life - it had'nt dawned on them that 5 years is a "generation apart" and our parents were now 2-3 generations apart...Generation gap - had never been so stark! So was born the biggest dilemma of this generation of Indians "to be or not to be"...

I think many of the pre 1995 era kids or the pre-liberalisation era kids in India go through this confusion - I face this dilemma between my communist,family-bound, collectivist childhood and "its my life capitalism" based adolescence and increasingly individualistic adulthood...This dilemma has always existed in the past generations - but those who chose their own lives were clearly "rebels" in that era. Now its far more magnified in this generation, by the empowerment and opportunities that liberalization brought to us - its no longer rebelling to be individualistic, it becomes as basic a "right to live my life the way I want to"

Fighting for this right can be taxing on one's life and it has been for me...more later!

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