Going through the magazines on the stand on a regular college day- the familiar “INDIA TODAY “caught my eye, not because it had the face of the even familiar JAGAN MOHAN REDDY but because of the title of the cover story “impatience of the youth”- that is when it occurred to me “Why are we being labeled as impatient ?”
“Sabre ka phal meetha hota hai “-This, I think was the only lesson we learnt in our childhood regarding patience. The lessons which we learnt after that had more impact on us. These lessons mainly had to deal with only one concept “The race of life” In which we were taught to keep running no matter what.... as fast as the others were running if not faster.
Come standard 10th, youngsters are told that they now have to step up and have to keep themselves ahead of everyone and that does not stop there, the ordeal as it is only gets much harder when the student enters junior college with entrance exams such as PMT, CPT, AIEEE, EAMCET, IIT-JEE etc. These students are left wishing for more hours in a day not even realising that they are actually missing out on the best and probably what should have been most carefree and fun-filled years of their life.
All this running and being trained in being restless until the goal is reached has subconsciously programmed us in being “impatient” (according to the bygone generation).
The next factor that adds to our restless is the technological advancement. The past decade bore witness to the maximum advancement in technology in all areas of science –medicine, engineering, telecom etc. The sector which has grown drastically in the past 10 years is communications –with cell phones and internet facility reaching almost every household in the country entailing “almost no waiting period”- where is the chance to exercise patience???
Finally, the biggest question which I have- Can it not be the other way round??
Can it not be that the generation which trained us to keep running and be restless couldn’t keep up with us anymore? Is it us who have become too fast or have they not changed their pace at all??Is it us who are fast or are they slow?
The past generation did not realise that while teaching us to run and push beyond our limits for academic excellence .They have set in motion a chain of events which resulted in young adults so used to rush and so used to making things happen- that we cannot wait for our dreams or goals to be reached eventually, we have to make them happen and they have to happen now.
Be it a Jagan Mohan Reddy or a Rahul Gandhi or an Omar Abdullah or any regular young adult we are all in constant planning and continuous state of action to make our dreams come true. Nobody sits silent nobody has patience .The only time they do is when they have reached were they wanted to reach.
According to Darwin’s concept of “Survival of the fittest “-the less fit or the unfit species tends to get phased out during the process of evolution. Are the fast runners the more fit species? So, will the slow runners eventually get phased out? Is this one of the factors contributing to our restlessness?
The final thoughts that come to me now are –Are we really impatient? Or this is all a quest of survival in the process of evolution?
The youth of today are not restless .The youth of today are not impatient .We are normal youth living in a society which runs fast and everyone living in the society contribute to it.
We have not made the society what it is now .This is the way we got it from our predecessors-fast moving and restless, maybe not as fast moving as it is now, but it surely was fast moving and even back then there was no place for slow runners .
When there is no scope for slow movers and there never was, is it wrong to be a runner? Is it justified to label the youth as impatient when we are just running at our pre-programmed pace?
This is just something to think about .Opinions made over ages rarely change overnight.
-Sumaiya.A. Shah
