Gap in generation - an echo

 All of us are lucky to be born into the latest generation and but few of us survive to be labelled the oldest generation before we give away our current body and return to our favourite abode with our favourite people. The story that happens between these two events are often categorised as life of a person. For a colony like India many things were reset from the colonial era often wiping out our history before British as mere fantasy.

When new country was formed, our priorities would have been on nation building. After being looted for few generations & trained to be a good disciplined Victorian labourer, we fancied a British life and Anglo goals as a motivation to work towards. India continued it’s Babu culture and government servants(if am allowed to say), took the role of the Britishers in all facets of Indian life. We being poor and agriculture dependant country; people often had a choice to be a good farmer and face the uncertainties of life devoted to natural calamities, fight for rights and subsidies by feeding the ever hungry corrupt politicians and government officials. And the other choice was not great either which was to be a factory worker who was abused in innovative ways by rich business elite who in turn funded the politicians to stay in power to make the decisions they needed to grow their business and clout often nick named as lobbying.

This part of the Indian story is not found in any history books but it is all there in every his and her story when we look at our previous generations. These lack of options definitely triggered the poor to aspire to be one among the elite, and the easiest way out of this was education and qualify for a better quality of life and stand a chance. Initial few decades or independence led many states to focus strongly on education of their youth who started filling up the middleman roles as government servants which was the most stable and lucrative job available. This guaranteed life long income and job security often allowing the next generations to aspire bigger and bigger. After few generations of stability many families got the appetite to take up riskier bets which was to start businesses. 

The growth in educated class and shortage of employment for all the skilled youth, gave many a chance to travel abroad and find jobs often making them richer and driving their family wealth forward. They became the crux of the remittance towards India fuelling India’s growth in some ways. Many got lucky with the growth of cities to outskirts and making many who were not educated but farming focused also get wealthy overnight due to real estate boom. Indians never ceased to create wealth and get richer anyways. Net-net every generation led the previous one forward and added to the bundles of cash already amassed. 

More wealth and spare income, led to Indians plundering them on luxury and travel often mimicking the British life which their great parents aspired to have. From loin cloth, to pyjama, to shorts, to pants, to bermudas and back to shorter shorts we came in no time. It’s not far that we would go back to loin cloth if current ways continue. You can call it fashion or bankruptcy, it really wouldn’t matter. Indians understood that the success is only for risk takers and the strength being parents and kids being connected as one unit until the kids find their ways. Parents were ready to sell their homes to get their kids settled abroad as they have seen it work out well for their neighbours umpteen times. The habit of buying and storing gold also helped Indian household. According to a report from the Oxford Gold Group, Indian households hold a total of 11% of the world's gold—more than the combined reserves of the United States, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Switzerland, and Germany. 

We are at a stage where most families are now boasting of having global citizenship with a big chunk of population living abroad.  In the financial year 2023-24, Maharashtra accounted for 20.5% of the total remittances, with Kerala at 19.7% and Tamil Nadu at 10.4%. Overall around $135.46 billion in remittances to India came in the recent year. This shows that unlike many other countries, Indians don’t want to leave their roots and want to invest in their homeland often making their parents proud. This also bumps up the real estate prices to a level that a common Indian living in India can’t afford it any more. 

Agricultural income in India is generally exempt from income tax under Section 10(1) of the Income Tax Act. This does help a section of risk takers and also encourages a large chunk of newer generations to explore farming as an area to invest. In recent years, we have welcomed many new retail investors to Indian stock markets which is another sign of Indians having spare income and/or aspiring to get rich quicker with lower amount of investments due to inflated real estate prices. 

The price of education has reached all time highs now that studying in a city like Bangalore is almost as expensive as studying anywhere in the world. This is also helping people make the easy decision to send their kids abroad to study for a better quality of life and a newer start to their life all the while uplifting the family status. A sudden change in the salaries in India has helped a good chunk of barely educated youth to earn higher and enhance their lifestyles with the blooming of services industry like Uber, Ola, Swiggy, Zomato etc.,

Now anyone with a license and mobile could find decently paid job if they have willingness to put effort. Considering the benefit of uplifting their families life and have access to better luxury many went forward trying their luck in these services job. This also helped to reduce the unemployment in some ways. Imagine people being job less and having energy to spare, what a pain they could become to the society if not channelised correctly. 

The exposure to lives of others via Insta, X and YouTube drives the youth to try the stunts at home and aspire to live a life which is not practical and sensible. But definitely the businesses are getting help from people punching above their weights and going for big brands versus looking at their pockets and saving for future. Indians had started to stop worrying about future in many ways as now they had demystified the fact that with nothing on their side and just hard work if their previous generations could make it this far, we could definitely recover from any kind of fall as we have time on our side and this time it’s not just out time but India’s time is good too to take bigger risks. The priorities if people had changed, and everyone seems to be in a rush to he successful often overlooking that patience and time is the biggest virtue and compounding wealth with time is the secret sauce. But who has time to waste when we see our people of our age, whatever that age is dying every now and then. Instead of learnt to be calculative, most of learn to just go full throttle.

Now if we go back go where we started this blog, remember that in India we have still a large portion of people still at level one if you can imagine the stable income job being level 1 and their families are waiting to level up. The generation gap is not related to any generation that we are born into in this country but the level of the families to which we are born. One interesting aspect of India is that, you like it or not families are strong thing still which helps Indians to grow and take bigger risks. This changing mindset and demographics of India is both its strength and its weakness at the same time. When a parent things they are better than their previous generations and a kid things they are now a level up, there will be always differences and a gap seen as generation gap but within India across all levels, remember we have all the generations living their life at same time aspiring to go one level up. This drive and passion is seen in almost every Indian partly due to poor government facilities and support, it is not going to let us down but catapult us to higher and farther in life. Keep dreaming and you will take this country forward for sure.