THE MOTHERS WITH THEIR GEN NEXT CHILDREN

 

Get up dear sweetheart, the clock is going to hit 11 AM, you already have completed a sleep of 7 hours, and it is now time to get up, freshen up, and do pranayama and yoga. You need to keep your body fit and agile and mind fresh and detached from the hangovers of office work of yesterday. You have been working from home. You should use the precious 2 hours that you earlier had to waste in commuting to and fro office. 

   The sweet girl was still sleeping when the mother came back to check after making the morning aloe vera turmeric juice. She placed the glass of the freshly prepared juice on the table which was full of electronic gadgets and two laptops. Before walking out to complete her remaining daily chores she did not forget to remind her to get up. She repeated the motherly pieces of advice she had used to encourage her daughter sometime before.

   Motherly love had gathered a bit of extra power when she came back to her daughter’s room to collect the glass which she thought had been emptied by her daughter but found that her sweet girl is still sleeping oblivious of clock time and advises. The words now were harsher with an ultimatum to the daughter to get up within no time. The daughter had now got up and was sitting frown faced on her bed. The drinking of the glass of juice took about 10 minutes, higher than the usual time to drink a glass of juice.

   The desperate mother now has run to her husband to share her feelings: why are members in the present generation so different from that we used to be during our young days. Most of the younger generation now are following a routine that is appearing weird to us. The contemplation and decipheration of observations on the lifestyles of the generations next to us and then next to next are not matching.

The discussion between the wife and her husband, like most other parents around the world, went on something like this:

Þ      How would people with minds like ours cope with the generation much advanced than us in cyberspace? Exposures to biotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, are reengineering the lifestyles of each one, including ours, albeit slow. While we of the earlier generation are slow in picking up the fast-paced technological innovations, we at the same time are also getting tuned and feeling comfortable with the series of reengineering process. Comfortable with radio sets, and television sets, and landline telephones we too are now used to remote-controlled devices, reading eBooks, and moving stories through escalators. We however are slow in catching up with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Þ      You and I of our generation, the discussion went on, are not able to fathom the implanted systems (chips) into the physical bodies to get stimuli directly into the neural cells. Four decades back, headphones were magical devices to enjoy loud music without disturbing the closest sitting person at home or during travels. Today’s generation is now at the stage of implanting chips into their brain. Their ears will not be required to be plugged with consoles to listen to music. The stimuli will sensitize the exact neural cells and give the same happiness of listening to music. It is going to be in the future. But it is important to know that the understanding of the word “future” also has changed so drastically. Now in “the distant future” means “within 2 years”, and “not in the next century” means within 10 years”.

Þ      With such advancements in lifestyles and the pursuit of happiness, the young generation is unable to understand the writings in the Holy Gita. The confusion in their mind is that if the best way to live a meaningful life is one of ultimate bliss, then the means to achieve this bliss through the use of machines and artificial intelligence should not be misconstrued as ignorance towards history and cultures. Nothing is wrong in their thought process. The evolutionary process is bound to happen as it has happened for millions of years. 

Þ      The next generation is going to give us products that will prove that scientists have reached the stage of mimicking several natural products and through the application of logic and machines which earlier generations had read in fiction and ancient history books. A couple of such examples are airplanes (flying from one place to the other), television (seeing remotely and without getting affected of the actions on the ground of happening), facsimiles (sending words through ether and air), smart phones (remotely controlling every household goods), and driverless cars.

Þ      Having attained these magnificences, the development wises of the gen-next will be more and more sophisticated. Their agenda will be to live a pattern that would make (a) physical movement superfluous, (b)  hunger satiable through quick bites, and (c) wake and sleep as per the desires. That means everything they would like to achieve will be individual-specific. We will find people sleeping in the morning, working in the night, and jogging at midnight. That will be the lifestyles of the future, mutually exclusive and completely independent of each other.

Þ      The conferencing systems through video and audio have made even many of us of the Yester-generations omnipotent and omniscient in certain ways. Simultaneously each participant is present at more than one place. It is not blasphemy any longer when the youngest of the kid in the family sometimes, innocently or maybe very logically, says that modern science has made me omniscient like gods. Scientists today have done much better than the Old Testament gods.

Who needs tocompromize these at a faster pace? Let us debate on it.

   Maybe people like us of the Yester-generation need to understand better than trying to make the evolving generation to keep their minds fixed with old systems. The onus certainly is on all of us is to see that the evolution does not make things laughable but laudable.

   Say, cell division. Modern science has been able to synthesize molecules that grow vegetables within hours. Chemicals are synthesized to ripen unripe fruits like papaya, banana, etc. Chemicals make pulps and seeds of watermelon and pomegranates look natural red. We are seeing these, and the younger generation is producing such things, irrespective of merits or demerits. But fact remains that cell mutations have been made possible. The bright side is that it is the treatment of damaged cells and the flip side is that it is a synthesis of viruses. All these are described in the Gita and other Puranas. For example, Pradyumna the son of Srikrishna got adulthood within a fraction of a second. The Gita and the Puranas are thus facts, and we should logically explain these to the gen-next.

   Every generation has its roots deep-rooted. All generation thus are respect-worthy. There is nothing to worry about and get desperate.

   Let your child determine her lifestyle. She will prove herself better than you.

Cheers.

DEBAHUTI