Freshman

I am sitting in my car on a bumper-to-bumper road, on my way to work, listening to the local station trying to tell me how the roads are all clear. Yeah, right. Look at those darned cameras, now, you. Just as I am about to switch to my friend of misery, I hear an interesting tid-bit. That the class of 2013 was born in 19-fricking-91.

Let’s do the math.

In 2013, when the class graduates, Chip himself will be only 10 years away from being a freshman. Which is how long I have been living in this country and have very little recollection of how the decade whizzed past.

1991.

When these kids were barely out of their babyhoods, I was a freshman myself. In the time, these babies cut their teeth, learnt to walk, talk, read, write, do math (or not) , date and apply for college and basically grow 5ft at least, I have graduated, and post-graduated, met a guy of my dreams, married, got a job, bought a house and spawned.

Now that I think about it that way, it makes me feel a wee bit better. Also makes it easier to ignore the fact that I have also grayed, put on 30lbs (and that’s all I am really going to admit to) and wrinkled like a shirt that was not removed from the dryer promptly. I am a bonafide auntie now.

So, for the class of 2013, the following has always been their life.

1. Salsa has always outsold ketchup
2. Text has always been hyper
3. They never had to “shake down” an oral thermometer
4. European Union has always existed
5. Cable TV has always offered phone service and vice versa
6. There have always been flat screen TVs
7. Smoking has been uncool
8. There has always been a computer in the Oval office
9. Britney Spears has been always heard on classic rock stations.

(See the complete list here)

For my generation, living in India,

1. Internet was unheard of,
2. PCs were rare, we worked using “dumb terminals” in colleges
3. W used Pine for email.
4. Sundays meant Ramayan or Mahabharat or Star Trek re-runs on Doordarshan
5. MTV was the new fangled “western influence out to corrupt young minds”.
6. Floppy disks (the 5 and ¼ inch) ones were the rage.
7. USB was unheard of.
8. CDs were criminally expensive and tape was the way to go. There was no random access and you had to change sides. Chip, has seen my old tapes and thinks they are “funny” and wonders what their use is. When I tell him they play music, he looks for a button on the cassette, a la ipod.

For Chip, the idea that someone does not own a cellphone or an ipod is unthinkable. Everything can be found “online”. And “online” is a button away with the iphone. So are games, music, photos and videos. CDs are so 20th century. Tapes can be found in museums. You never print directions, you just punch the address into the GPS. If you don’t know something, you don’t look it up in a book, you ask your mom to just google.

Oh, Chip! How will the world change when you go into your Freshman year? How, indeed?