Thomas, Richard and Harold

... or Tom, Dick and Harry as we often call the 'common men', are living in a century remarkably different from the ones before it. Life has gathered incredible speed thanks to the benefits of our modern age. I still remember the moment in my childhood when a telephone was first installed at home, and I got to call someone for the first time. Or the moments when at the age of eight, I used to wonder how people could suddenly shrink in size to get inside a radio and play miniscule instruments from inside that box. During those golden nascent years in the 1980s and 1990s, my generation believed that we had the world at our feet and I even used to ridicule my elders pointing out how they never had a TV or a phone in their youth. Little did I realise that the unequal gifts that time bestows on generations is usually the product of the toil and brilliance of the generations preceding them. But so is the burden of reaping the misfortune of their mistakes and conflicts. Time is a double-edged sword on which we hang precariously.

The children of today can use a cellphone and switch on a computer at the age of two. At five, they can beat you at their favourite video racing game. At twenty, I leave that to the imagination. But at the same time, a young boy in Afghanistan or Somalia will most likely grow out of a tormented and dangerous childhood into a difficult life, for no fault of his, even if he manages to survive until his teens. An aging North Korean will wait agonisingly for the day she can meet her siblings in Seoul, even though that day is probably beyond her lifetime. These are burdens of the part which individuals and generations keep carrying around for years and sometimes lifetimes. Many of them do not comprehend why it has happened to them, before they even got a chance to roll their dices.

So they live on as Tom, Dick and Harry of their own societies, shoved along the raging torrent of newsmaking events, distant wars and peer pressure. The common thread that binds them together is made from the fabric of uncertainty. Take a nation like Pakistan, for example, considered by many to be a failed state. It has young men and women growing up in various directions - some trying hard to break out of the stereotyped pressure of their social norms and turning the rudder of the ship around for a better future, while a few others head off north to vent their dissastisfaction in other misguided pursuits. In burgeoning India, my quaint motherland, many people of my generation are atop a magical flying carpet of globalisation but within them simmers the growing questions about their value to their society. What am I doing? How will I be remembered? Join the Army? Shovel hard into the pit of an engineering education and hope to do something brilliant? Spend 10 years slogging on a medical career to do some good for others? Burn into oblivion in a high-paying Bangalore job while losing all sense of identity? Run for politics and bring a revolution on Day One? Watch cricket all day long? Disappear into the mountains for a month off from everyone? Join the local newspaper as a free reporter? Head off to Tokyo for a sabbatical posting? See through the illusion of a volatile market index and take out all my money and donate it to CRY? Get into a scam? Start a musical band for the 20th time? Run myself into the ground trying for an MBA like many of my friends are doing? Or just sit by the seaside with other friends and brainstorm about how to hijack the next ISRO space capsule and flee to the moon? Questions, ideas, quirks and impromptu debates. That is where the best 20 years of our lives wither away. Or if I turn that thought upside down, they are what make those 20 years the best years.

Take the collective mindset of millions of Toms, Dicks and Harries, and Jills, Betties and Sarahs and what have we got ? The power to ignite history and at the same time, the self-cancelling lethargy to accept what is handed down. The same lethargy that easily makes one a fan of Barack Obama without bothering to find out more about him - simply because he is not Republican and he is not white and he "seems" to have a better approach towards facing the world (forget his taxation whims and that John McCain is NOT George Bush). Distortion finds new ways to influence young minds and makes us more prone to the two fundamental sins (as per Franz Kafka) - impatience and laziness, from where all other sins are derived. This distortion is a product of the clash of billions of thoughts zigzagging their way through newspaper words, entertaining friends, TV soundbites, arguing friends, prancing celebrities, incensed friends, unread novels, lovestruck friends, exaggerated biographies and jilted friends. So how does one expect poor Tom, Dick and Harry (and Jill, Betty and Sarah) to be any different?

Let's stop being Tom, Dick or Harry (or Jill, Betty or Sarah). Let's rise above sea level.