On a cold December evening, huddled around a gently glowing fire, four of us chatted long into the night about the sort of thoughts that come to mind when the horizon of the New Year sidles into view. Oh, you know about renewals and new beginnings, of memories of an increasingly glowing past, and about wiping the slate clean. Our painter-friends, Viswanadhan and Nadine, who divide their time between Paris and Cholamandal were in Delhi visiting us on their way to Chennai.

The goblets of red wine and bits of wickedly dark Belgian chocolate opened a Pandora’s box of memories, both of bruised and burnished dreams. Not to speak of the usual nostalgic lament over an era that was not only passing, but had passed into oblivion. A dumbed-down generation, we sighed, was at the helm of the hurtling ship of culture, propelled forward by waves of instant-pop culture. Each successive one driving out its predecessor.

Culture, the one with the big C, was on the retreat, pushed to the fringes and reduced to wallflower status at the glittering ball of the arts, we collectively moaned. And so, we smugly patted ourselves for having turned our backs on television, overloaded as it was with mind-bogglingly inane reality shows and celebrity-obsessed fare.

Our Paris-based friends had disposed of their television set and turned to public radio to find out what was happening in the world at large – their only electronic link, not counting the internet, to the outside world of news and views and friends. We also congratulated each other that evening on our retreat into the realm of books, DVDs of the ‘classics’ of cinema and small dinner parties where what was on the mind counted more than what was on the plate, and on our bodies.

In the increasingly snazzy, wine-fuelled world of art, studded by the flavour-of-the-moment glitterati who are supposed to up the buzz barometer wherever they go, artists ‘come and go’ – not talking about (to appropriate some much-quoted T S Eliot) ‘Michelangelo’ (or even Husain and Subodh Gupta) but the art mandi. Who’s selling what – for how much and to whom? And, of course, that all-important question: who is the best artist to invest in? A painter, now in the shimmering golden autumn of his life, recently told me that he could only discuss ideas with “the friends of my youth…. The others just talk about money or where they have been or are going. I really feel isolated.” Each generation gives the one that follows a big thumbs-down. Make that ‘generations’ for the cozy, fireside quartet that December night, when we started out by bemoaning the fact that the generations who came after us didn’t have, rather didn’t make the time to reflect. In the scramble to get ahead they seldom stopped to explore ideas. Barely able to hold a thought, most of them found it impossible to follow it through.

Cruising into the contemplation zone was out of the question for the iPod Generation. The next morning as I sat down to write this column I realised that it was unfair to blame them. A relentless, unceasing avalanche of information comes at them from all corners: the small screen, their BlackBerrys, their ipods, netbooks and the internet. With news forever breaking on television, 24/7, (even if it is the same news over and over again) it becomes impossible to find the silence essential to soak it all in.

Memory then becomes an early casualty of the constant barrage of stimuli. You need a perennial tabula rasa, like those self-erasing slates, to be able to take in what’s coming at them. The present, the philosophers and poets tell us, is supposed to contain both the past and the future. But for today’s youth the Now becomes paramount.

Krishna, my husband and a physicist, had earlier that evening attended a talk by Professor C N Yang, a Chinese-American physicist and Nobel laureate, at JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University). In fact, his account of the 87-year-old scientist’s remarks about memory and the need to tenaciously pursue a thought sparked our discussion on how different generations relate to the past: the current one apparently had no time for memory. Professor Yang said that he often used to relate stories that his father had told him, to his three sons. His sons soon forgot them, but he never did.

Writing (organic you could say) is perhaps another casualty of the age of instant information and texting. The latter with all the abbreviations and signs was almost morphing into 21st century hieroglyphics. Words were, according to Viswanadhan, rapidly losing their resonance. Malayalam, especially the script, was an integral part of him because of the way he had been taught the language. “When I was about two the guru would hold my finger and make alphabet letters on the (uncooked) rice that had been spread out on a plate. A year or so later I was told to draw letters in the sand. After which we were given slates. It was only when I was about six that we got books to write in.”

Fortunately before we could go further down the cynic’s path of criticising GenNet and everything the present had to offer, we were brought up sharp by Nadine’s intervention. Dazzled by the gizmos and game-changing advent of the internet, the 20-somethings and the 30-somethings tended to become slaves to it. For many of them books and newspapers had become redundant in the age of electronic media and Kindle.

However, a large number of the generation after them – tweens and adolescents – had begun to take a step back and exercise a choice or choices. They can have the pleasure of turning a page as well as scrolling. No longer was it imperative for them to cocoon themselves in the wired world, depending on it exclusively for information, music, entertainment…. An increasing number of Nadine’s friends were doing away with their television sets.

Are we treading softly back to the future – taking along with us the baggage of the past we want to? According to an article in The New York Times recently, the sales of vinyl and turntables had jumped significantly, ‘fuelled largely by growing demand from members of the iPod generation’.

Perhaps, this generation has it right: they want to take back control of their lives. As for those of us lamenting the passage of time we could do with following the lead of the tweens – Kindle or scroll when we want, flip pages and hold on to our leather-bound tomes when we want. It’s a smorgasbord of choices out there.

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