Till yesterday afternoon I had wanted my next blog post to be about my haircut and the profound significance it has in my life.

Then, after a couple of hours or so, I found myself in what passes off for a café in Bombay, sipping bad coffee, under an asbestos roof, sitting on a cane sofa that would, in time, give me a back ache and waiting for an expensive bagel sandwich (yet another example of the city’s overhyped and, hence, overpriced mediocrity).
I was reading the Sunday sections of the day’s newspapers. They were about India winning her freedom, or rather, Indians winning freedom for their country.
I had read quite a bit when – while trying to ensure that the salt-less cream cheese did not squeeze itself out of the crusty semi-circles of bread – I looked up and around me. The place was full of young people: Men and women, boys and girls, laughing and joking, kissing and sniggering, vigorously thumbing the keypads of their candy-coloured cellphones. I realised how irrelevant this whole independence thing must be for them.

The awful manner in which history is taught in schools cannot alone be held responsible for the lack on interest the generation shows in what happened before it was born. How are these 20-somethings supposed to know what it means to wear only cotton not just out of a sense of patriotism but simply because there was no option; how are they to know what satyagraha must have meant; how are they to know what the Dandi March was about?

The generation has been born into a country where, as an urban youngster, the only restraint they might face in achieving their goal is financial.

Just when I was all worked up about the irrelevance of the past in the present, I also realised that I too was born after more than 30 years of independence, brought up under no limitations except financial ones. So, how am I any different?

Well, I thought defiantly, I have spent a childhood with 10 to 12 hours of daily power cuts; studied in the light of kerosene lamps for many years; run to neighbours and local shops to make emergency phone calls as the only phone at home would be dead for weeks at a stretch; neither me, nor my friends, knew what pocket money was; satellite television came to our home in my late teens; I sent my first email when I was in college and went to a Barista for the first time when I was 21. Hence, I can claim to have known and lived through a childhood and adolescence that was more difficult than what came after, soon after.

And, I am sorely tempted to wear this knowledge and experience – of a life and time more difficult than now – as a badge of honour.

Fact is, reading about all the heroic and self-less acts of the decades before independence never fails to make me feel like useless scum. I have heard of so many tales of bravado from my grandparents’ generation that I sometimes feel deprived of a cause as noble as theirs. After all, it is not my fault that I was born into a free country and there was nothing of the same caliber left for me to do.

It’s this hopeless feeling of itching to be a rebel but being at a loss for a cause good enough.