Generations (12/52)

YOLO - You Only Live Once - was a trend. By the lack of #yolo in social media updates, I guess it is safe for me to assume that the phase has passed. But just today, I was bombarded with not one, but two four letter acronyms.

FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out.

FOGO - Fear Of Going Out.

I fail to understand how my generation missed out on the acronym thing - I guess we were more concerned with omitting vowels from our words and erasing prepositions from our sentences. It was always the need of the hour to convey a higher amount of information at a lesser cost to available resources. That is the reason why our generation shortened "Where are you?" to "whr r u". And I'm pretty sure that the present generation have compressed it further to an acronym by now.

I showed the below picture to someone in the current generation and asked them to identify it. 

With no answers forthcoming, I introduced the Floppy Drive and told that it could hold all of 1.44Mb. The follow up question was unexpected, "What could it hold? Even a picture is of larger size."

It is for this reason that I believe my generation to be the bridge between the old and the new. We are old enough to know what a floppy disk is and how hard it was to use a dial up modem for internet, while at the same time, we are young enough to understand the concept of cloud computing. I first worked on a computer with a 256MB RAM, a 2GB Harddisk and a dial-up internet connection. Now, I own a phone with 8GB RAM, 128GB memory and with two 4G connections.

We know exactly how bad it was to appreciate how good it is now.

***

With all this talk about the Statue of Unity, I happened to find myself in an article, where Sardar Vallabhai Patel was talking about his good friend, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as follows:

"...It was, therefore, in the fitness of things that in the twilight preceding the dawn of independence he should have been our leading light, and that when India was faced with crises after crises, following the achievement of our freedom, he should have been the upholder of our faith and the leader of our legions. No one knows better than myself how much he has laboured for his country in the last two years of our difficult existence. I’ve seen him age quickly during that period, on account of the worries of the high office that he holds and the tremendous responsibilities that he wields.

…As one older in years, it has been my privilege to tender advice to him on the manifold problems with which we have been faced in both administrative and organizational fields. I have always found him willing to seek and ready to take it. Contrary to the impression created by some interested persons and eagerly accepted in credulous circles, we have worked together as lifelong friends and colleagues, adjusting ourselves each other’s advice as only those who have confidence in each other can."

I wish we had amongst our current crop of politicians, someone capable of having an erudite discourse like above. And I'm pretty sure that the acronym loving present generation is never going to be so descriptive about their buddy - they would probably say something like "He is YOLO."

***

Someone replied to me with IFKR. Hence, the thread for this post.