Gennext is Gennow

Many of today's achievers in diverse fields like politics, media, sports, cinema, technology, high finance, business, NGOs, are much younger than before and nobody's complaining.

File photo of Sania Mirza | Commons

What do you say when a straight-sets defeat for an Indian in Grand Slam third round becomes the stuff of headlines? Or when merely a point scored in the first set lost 1-6 becomes a cause for national cheer? An unkind way of looking at it could be in terms of, so this is what Indian tennis has come to! Finally, an Indian woman makes it to the third round of the Australian Open without beating a seed and then crashes out when she meets one, and all of India sees cause for celebration!

Actually, given the negativist way we look at things in India, this is just the kind of reaction you would have got from so many of us in the normal course of things. So many of our sports page headlines would have been something like “Sania flatters to deceive.” But I can quite take a bet that, or any other echo of that sentiment, is not what most papers would have in their headlines on Saturday. And I am writing this article on Friday afternoon, when sports desks are still to come to life.

What you will see, on the contrary, is a celebration of the arrival of a new star. Or rather a new, young star, a teenaged sensation. Anybody who saw her save four match points off a player 159 places ahead of her in ATP rankings, look unruffled as 12 aces whistled past her exquisite nose ring (mark my words, this will soon become a fashion statement in the world of women’s tennis, particularly if Sania keeps growing) and pass Serena Williams several times both with her forehand and backhand would merely cherish those moments, forget the result. Particularly because she exhibited such enthusiasm and energy, so typical of her years, and so much cool and composure, way beyond them.

Even in the world of sport, Sania is no exception. Irfan Pathan, just a year older than her at 19, was the fastest rising cricket star last year and you saw a similar sort of combination of youthful fire, emotion and yet maturity and sense of responsibility in his game ‘ remember him as the obdurate night-watchman of Chepauk who helped create a possible victory until rain robbed us of it on the last day? The cricket team also saw the arrival of two teenaged boys behind the stumps, a position usually occupied by an elder in most teams.

Sound very nice, you might say, but it is still insufficient evidence for the point I am making in this column, that we are finally seeing in India the rise of the talented, competitive and yet responsible young talent which in turn is forcing us to move from the centuries old Indian paradigm and start trusting the young with responsibility. For ours is a society that for generations has suspected the young, howsoever talented, of not being worthy of trust.

Our politicians have to be at least in their sixties to even get Cabinet berths, we prefer to trust doctors, lawyers, airline pilots, even the tailors and barbers we inherited from our parents’ times. The others are usually talented, “but still inexperienced.” After I wrote a National Interest complaining about this (‘A nation on a walking stick’, IE, June 10, 1998), Madhavrao Scindia called me home for tea and told me with great delight how his party still thought he was too young for responsibility. “I tell them, I am well past 50, I am a grandfather already. At what age do you think I will really be experienced enough for real political responsibility? At 75?”

Our society has traditionally put experience, and years, above talent and youthful energy. During the war in Kargil I got so many calls from senior military commanders complaining endlessly about some really small indiscretions and errors by the reporters on the spot. The message always was, why do you send such young reporters to cover a war? Why not send more experienced, more “responsible” people?

My standard response was, horses for courses. You send captains and jawans in their 20s to retake the ridges and the mountains, we send reporters of the same age to report on them, when you start sending brigadiers and major-generals in their late 40s and 50s to lead infantry charges, we will also send our editors along with them. The underlying message was still that somehow the young could not be trusted with anything requiring seriousness and a sense of discretion or responsibility.

That Indian cricket, for three years now, has trusted one teenager or the other for the wicket-keeper’s pivotal job is not the only evidence that this is changing. One of the most important lessons even the army learnt from Siachen was that the procedural obsession with seniority had resulted in its cutting edge formations having older commanders, rich on experience but really a bit old for the job. It has only last month cleared a new plan to bring down substantially the average age of its company and battalion commanders.

Here is one more test: remember how unsure you felt when you boarded a Jet Airways plane a few years ago looking at its teeny-bopper cabin crew and very young cockpit crew. One line you often heard was, all this is very fine and comfortable, but if I get into real turbulence I’d rather be in the more experienced hands of Indian Airlines pilots and stewardesses, many of whom have about as much experience flying as their Jet counterparts have in years.

Now when did you last hear that sentiment expressed? Five years back you went to an Apollo Hospital for routine tests, but if, God forbid, one of them threw up something really bad, you preferred to go back in to the more reassuring care of a veteran from a government medical college. Today, aren’t so many of us quite comfortable leaving our lives in the hands of much younger doctors and nurses at the same private hospitals or our neighbourhood polyclinics?

So many of our achievers today, people who are making a difference in fields as diverse as politics and the media, sports and cinema, the world of technology and high finance, business and NGOs, are much younger than before. What is more important, nobody seems to be complaining about it. While speaking at the Infosys annual excellence day at Bangalore earlier this month, I was struck by how few faces, in an audience of more than 10,000 of India’s most important techies, looked even in their thirties. Sure enough, the average age at Infy is just over 26 years. And nobody is holding it against them.

You still have doubts, look at cinema. Our hottest directors, Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, are all in their 20s or 30s. Again, nobody seems to be complaining. This is also a time for a similar shift in the corporate world with succession taking place across the board. Family patriarchs are giving way to much younger inheritors and older, professional CEOs are becoming mentors or striking out with enterprises of their own rather than hanging on to positions that have become static or vegetative for them and where much younger competition is snapping at their heels. This Parliament has more young entrants than any since Rajiv Gandhi’s team in 1984 and the next will definitely see most of our grand old men, the freedom movement generation, say goodbye.

So almost unnoticed, a generation shift is taking place in India. And because “experience” and years have commanded such premium in India until now, the change is now taking place in a way that the mantle is passing to a generation much younger, in effect knocking a decade if not two in the process of succession. Now, isn’t that something to celebrate, particularly when this reflects so wonderfully our demographics, our transition to a stage when we will be one of the most youthful populations in the world?

The only pity is that while this change takes everything in its sweep, our government’s structure is still out of this great movement. The same ideas of experience, seniority, the notion that the older an officer (or teacher in a government institution), the more reliable he is. Or even that real wisdom only dawns on bureaucrats when they retire, so the most important jobs in a liberalising economy, those of the regulators for example, must go to them ‘ you will see this when the new SEBI chairman is appointed next month. It is perhaps too much to expect the government to change with the times. But if Dr Manmohan Singh’s idea of administrative reforms does not take this into account, the gap between an ageing establishment and an increasingly younger society and economy will become a dangerous liability.