Fossil or archive, take your pick

MOMENTS before the sirens blared and the blackout began, I received a WhatsApp message: “The child asked what year I was born and I said 1978. She said that’s not a real year, years start with 20…’ This message meant that I was a fossil. But, the life lessons acquired by my dinosaur generation need reiteration. So, I decided to dip into my memory book before it is completely fossilised and lost forever.

During the 1971 India-Pak war, I was a little girl in Hoshiarpur, Punjab. Evenings were spent by the family huddled together — my mother cradling my infant brother, and dad and me going, “Sush! Don’t cry, the enemy will bomb us.” Pasting black paper on window panes to ensure complete darkness to the outside world, we waited for the furious sounds of aircraft overhead to ebb. My parents explained how our country’s armed forces were putting their lives at stake for us and our little inconvenience of sitting in the dark should not hurt. In those days, All India Radio was our only connect with reality, unlike the fiery TV channels and social media of today.

I clearly remember my father’s teary eyes one morning in Chandigarh in the early 1980s when he read about innocents taken out of a bus and shot by terrorists. The terrible turn of events — Operation Blue Star, the assassination of the Prime Minister and the 1984 riots are permanent scars on my memory. Tumultuous, turbulent, trying times, but we survived. While we were trying to settle professionally, there came the Mandal Commission that threatened the entire social edifice.

The brilliant truth of our life story is how after each episode that strained the communal and social fabric, we as a nation bounced back and most of us moved on, embracing our differences. The opening up of the economy, liberalisation, phenomenal infrastructure development — all came up in our lifetime as India forged ahead. Our ‘archaic’ generation witnessed the hoopla around the turn of the century. The excitement around entering the new millennium and the concerns about computer systems falling apart were real, but we sailed through.

The pandemic years, with all the trauma, were also experienced by the 2000s generation as our partners. Together we grieved over our losses. The takeaways — family time, helping in household chores and work from home. Remember how we tried to scare away the coronavirus, beating thalis! That was innovative. And, how, after the Covid years, we became frenzied travellers as if ‘Kal Ho Na Ho…’

We are the generation which savoured victory in the 1999 Kargil war, with Captain Vikram Batra saying “Yeh dil maange more!” Yet again, we salute our armed forces for safeguarding us in the current India-Pak conflict. Come on, Gen 2000s, you’ve got everything on a platter. Wishing you greater strides!

Musings