By :- Tanya Shah

As a child, I thought that growing up meant untold freedom. I was probably right. Freedom is not about no baths and no frilly frocks any longer, but its here. Maybe our grandparents thought the same way when they became the first generation to receive liberal education. Maybe our parents thought so when they became the first Indians to grow up in an independent democracy. Elder brothers and sisters became the first desi teenagers to taste the sweetness of MNC fruit. And wewe are truly free because for one, all those important things have been ours without even having to ask for them. And then, think about how barriers have fallen in our lifetime. I dont even blink at wondrous things like satellite television, PalmPilots, celltels and MP3 sites. That says a lot about pace and progress, not to mention money.

Just look back, and it takes your breath away, so many things!in so little time! 1984 was actually eighteen whole years ago! And what kind of weird coincidence is that anyway, nineteen eighty-four, the only year that shares its name with a cult book that predicts stupefying happenings in said spell. What the hell, George Orwell. When I was old enough to understand, I was secretly horrified that Indira Gandhi died in the year of my birth, and secretly pissed off that I had missed the World Cup win by a few months. By the time I realised that I had nothing to do with any of this, I could already identify Imran Khan as the rightest captain of the wrongest side in the world. And someone over the radio was screaming that Rajiv Gandhi, that handsome young Prime Minister, had been killed in a village with an awfully long name. The Rajiv assassination became the first public tragedy understood and felt by us six-year olds. Being a Bombay child, the Mandal riots swept the country without my knowledge. I loved the sound of Scheduled Caste, but had to have the term explained repeatedly before I understoodonly very little. Newly-arrived BBC told me who George Bush was, but any connection between his wood-paneled conference rooms and the bleak battlefields of the Gulfwell, what do you know. Cable TV and colour TV stick together in my memory. Maybe we had colour before, but it was completely wasted on national programming. Compare he grey walls and black moods of DD newscasts to the magenta lycra and red hair and golden saxes that trumpeted MTV in! Zee followed soon after, and I fell off my chair with delight. Hindi was good. English was bad. Much as I hated the news (I still gag at the words Sansad Samachar), I hated MTV more. Dad and Mom watched it a lot, but the only song I could bear was Too Sexy. I liked the growl even if I couldnt catch the words. Which was best, since my convent school psyched me out to think that sexy was the word that would damn Karishma (then with the h) Kapoor to eternal hell. I still cant swear without feeling a twinge of guilt. G n R was okay because of the wedding cake and roses and all, but Eric Clapton was the pits. So was Janet Jackson or was it Paula Abdul. I ignored Madonna completely, because deep down I knew what my beloved Sister Marian would think of her. Give me Amitabh Bachchan any day. Or Sachin Tendulkar, who became better than Sunil Gavaskar, brighter than Kapil Dev and more beloved than Imran Khan, then embroiled in a controversy over one young Tyrian Jade White he allegedly fathered, just weeks before general elections in Pakistanwhich he was contesting. Ohh, we shiver! Their cricketerslike that! Ourcricketerslike this! (pointing to Sachin.) What a guy. What a batsman. What curls. Wehelped to build his legend, we kids with considerably fewer heroes than other little people. All the boys wanted to be like himthey still do. None of us girls came out to watch the match unless he was at the crease. This latterfact changed with the dawn of Dravid, slow and steady and shy and sweet. Then came Ganguly, and Boycotts accent, and Azhar and Jadeja shown up as no better than that ape Cronje. God, how I hated the team. Scum. LOSERS. I had lost interest in their sorry fates long ago, but you cant help being shocked at these people cheating a whole nation. Years have passed. Hansie has made his last horrifying headlines. Only a handful of eighteen-year olds who watch cricket are girls. But I still watch Sachin. I watch him sell cars and cola and credit cards because Sachin doesnt just play crickethe IS cricket, three ducks and all. Communalism came home in 1992. For the first time, I was a little scared. The pictures in the paper were the worst I had ever seen, and everything was quiet, deserted. It was fun playing catch on the main road minus any vehicles, but the silence was eerie. We werent being sent to school, we were told, to keep us out of danger. The violence ended with a bang. Of those days, one thing rose clear above past the bombs, the burning chawls and charred limbs. Someone had gotten this neatly stencilled onto some BEST buses, right near the door so you couldnt miss it: Black Friday: Hundreds die in riots. Saturday: 99% attendance reported at workplaces. SALAAM BOMBAY! The older people were going to work, the apparent reason being that they were Bombayites. At that instant, Bombay became my favourite city, apart from the rest of the world, better than London and New York and dumb old Delhi. No one from Bombays 1984 batch thinks otherwise. Do big cities do that to everyone whos born and bred in them? Mumbai now is different. Buildings and places that were once grand and imposing now look tired and faded, sagging like wrinkled cheeks. There are scandalous whispers of new hubs for India. We are ignored by rock bands, solar eclipses and earthquakes alike. We dont know what happened. Did it change with the name? Certainly the people didnt change. They still dont give a damn about what happened yesterday, or about the fact that they have been robbed of their identity as Bombayites and been made Mumbaikars, or else. Mumbai is no longer the paradise Bombay was, but theres no place else to call home. Miss Universe, Miss World, Shah Rukh Khan, Juhi Chawla, Didi tera Devar and Darr, Cotton Eye Joe and that bloody-awful Macarena. So many different children, so many things in common. Some parts of our lives are so similar. As ten-year olds, we weptWEPT! in theatres when Renuka Shahane tripped and fell down those steps. We probably did hear of Kurt Cobains last little shotgun stunt, but I cant remember a single person being perturbed. Maybe because America was still too far out of reach, and guys with girls haircuts didnt make much good music anyway. (kids, KIDS!) For us, books became redundant. Meaning, theyre there alright, lots of em, and theyre more fun than most things, but they just dont tell you anything the TV and the Net cant. The fanatic reader, for the most part, is no longer a teenager. Naipaul is the old man who cried when he got his Nobel Prize. Rushdie is the fatwa guy. Convenience is writing a book report about the movie version. Its as if the scope for imagination has seeped out of the world. When you can see it, why make-believe it? What we can see is very much like fantasy anywaylarger than life, faster than thought and stranger than fiction. Consider an instance. Girl marries prince, and England rejoices. Girl divorces prince, and the Western World is upset. Girl dies in crash and the whole world goes into deep shock. Sadder things may have happened, but we did not pay attention. What did we care? What is known is that Dianas death and the time thereafter became a sort of milestonein media coverage, in mass hysteria and for some unfathomable reason, in private lives; to remember your first year of adolescence by it, linking it to the thought that after that one particular day, nothing was quite like before. Four years later, something did happen to surpass that frenzy, to entrench itself in living teen memory as the worst thing that ever happened in the world. And bigger events may take place in the futurecircumstances that will obscure the Diana margarine tubs and tribute albums, but the bewildered sadness of those days will be hard to forget. Even Mother Teresa, with a kinder heart and an address closer home couldnt turn the tide away from youth and beauty and the glamorous violence of it all. With adolescence came the dip in the roller coaster. Suddenly, things were moving too fast. The Boardsalways a grim, if distant prospectwere becoming a reality. Suddenly, tuitions were no longer for slow kids only, they were where you spent your life if you werent in school. You had to buck up for your school tests to make it above a cut-off for coaching class entrances. To make things worse, boys were proving themselves to be human, which added to Class Tens collective worries. We had to begin thinking about college. We, who airily chatted of being mountaineers and scuba divers were suddenly faced with choosing between Commerce and Science. So things hadnt changed so wildly eitheryou talked of The Alternate Career, unlike your parents, but your choices werent all that different from theirs. Doctors and engineers for Science; accountants and corporate heirs for Commerce; journalists, civil servants and shiftless buggers for Arts. Or hey, think about the MBA. So much respectability, so much moolah, and so much damn space for everyone. This whole proliferation of MBA mania became slightly dubious. It seemed to qualify you to talk a lot, and talk really fast, but what WORK did you do? Something awfully grand that was beyond me, no doubt. The Alternate Career has become a reality for more and more people with the passage of time. You only have to look around at all the DJs, all the adventure sportsmen, all the environmental activists to keep the flame of hope flickering in your heart, that someday you will have a job that you love dearly AND keeps your body and soul together. Still, the more things change, the more they remain the same...