Are you smarter than a fifth grader?

Are you smarter than a 5^th grader? No... You are absolutely not. No second thoughts about it. Today’s 5^th graders outsmart us in all the possible ways. Their lifestyle going so exuberant, things around them changing so rapidly, their adaptability to the techno world has amazed me. But on the contrary, I feel they’re really missing something that we all enjoyed. Even though it’s my nostalgia that’s doing the talking here, I refuse to accept that they have a better upbringing than we all had. These are some of the things that I feel, that contemporary kids are really missing.

Mother tongue: I’ve seen kids playing on my street most fluently using the “F” and “B” words. Frankly, I learnt the word fuck in 8^th grade and until high school; I was under the impression that fcuk is misspelt. At that time all I had was the magas, machas, sisyas. I enjoyed it so much. And the best part is my parents never forced me to get into rat race. Today’s urban kids don’t even know the meaning of the most common words in their mother tongue, because their parents insist them to use English everywhere. Just look around and you can find such great parents who attended cockpit parenting classes to give their kids best they deserved, whose kids LOL at their own parents’ vocabulary, at their back.

Nick names: Hucha, Baba, Mowgli, Dicchi, Pirie, cable, motor.. These are some of my friend’s nick names. I still call them with that. But today’s Sandeep is Sandy, Madhav is Maddy and Radha is Randy. I know one of the Harry Potter follower whose name on facebook is Albus Severus Vishnu. Any comments?

Games: All the games we played on road: Cricket, Lagori, Eye-Spy, board games like Business, Snake and Ladder, they’re all not extinct. But they’ve been moved to virtual space. You can find them on android market and iStore. And contemporary kids play them on their iPhones and tablets. Today’s kids are physically non existent and active only virtually.

Gizmos: No words can express how grand the feeling was when I got a PC at home. Today’s boys don’t think PC is cool. Reason: PCs lack mobility. I’ve seen school going kids talking about privacy and other big words. How much we struggled to look at desibabas and the desibabes on a dialup connection? (I hated sound that dial-up modem made). Today’s kids have most easy access to the legendary porn of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, and that too at 3G speed.

We had walkman with audio cassettes. They have Cloud. We played super Mario and contra for years. But even Counter Strike is obsolete for them. Technology is advancing so rapidly that Film camera, Landline phones, pagers and typewriters we used for ages are extinct gadgets for gen next kids.

If you closely scrutinize, from games to names, we had a “desi” touch in everything we did. What the contemporary Indians have failed to realize is the essence of this very “desi” flavor. After 30-40 years, the street smart, vigorous kids might just be extinct. And as always, we let things go beyond control and when we realize it, our jaws touch the floor with an expression like Tusshar Kapoor’s in every movie, surprised how it happened. This is a mediocre Indian mentality: Unless our ass is on fire, we never take off.

If you please excuse me, I’ve to get some tips from my nephew to complete angry birds, before he goes offline. Bye for now..!!


Image courtesy: pltprincess.wordpress.com