We as students read history right from our school days to get to know of all the irrelevant facts about who did what, when and where and how! I am not a historian but I believe in saying that "history repeats" because anything and everything I am currently experiencing in this world has been experienced by a lots of others somewhere in the time-line. We study to learn from past mistakes, gather data for prediction of life events, know about cultures but the history itself looks and probably is so much biased if we go only by the available writings.
Coming to a very small scale of geological time frame, If you ask me a simple question of what my great grandfather did for a living and his story of life. I have no clue! We do not know much more than our grandparents in our lineage. As a parent, does one really give knowledge of how social and financial life earlier was to his/her child? We are afraid that the youngster might develop some kind of impression over the family, relatives and hide some of the facts as we bury them deep down within ourselves. We are afraid to expose our problems in front of our children and make them understand the reality of life.
Today, we live in the era of technology, booming shopping malls, hyper-markets and multi-national business enterprises. The lifestyle of people, a generation earlier, were lot different from what we are going through now. Even the morals and values are not remaining the same. The attitude and pace over which we are leading life is changing very fast.
A simple instance: Nowadays, If a grandfather tells his grandson that he didn't have something called TV at his time to watch the kid shouts back to him saying that you are cooking-this-story-up for making me not watch the TV! Having the company of upper class society friends in junior school, the kid even comes and asks the parent if we are poor in just owning a Maruti Alto while his friends travel around in Honda city.
I have several open questions on my mind on my above bizarre random thoughts:
Why is society failing to learn from past and teach next generation? Is it the high rate of inflation over decades? Ever increase in economical gap between upper and middle class? Is it that we have lost the habit of reading Indian novels which expose rural side of our country to relate to our ancestor's life? Is it that we are losing something in over protecting our kids so that he never sees what actual suffering is? Are we shedding moral values down the drain in our pace of earning money and make a grand living?
