I have never been one of those brigades who talk about the 'Good Old Days'. I do talk about my past, but that is just to give an example of a concept while teaching. Other than that, I am a firm believer that the present has much more to offer than the past and the current generation is much superior to what we were in their age. I scoff at people who talk about 'the golden good old days'. It is nice to see an eminent journalist Ayaz Memom echoing my thoughts in http://www.dnaindia.com/
"It is in the human condition, perhaps, to see the past full of virtues, in a glowing, non-objective perspective filled with romance and nostalgia, and the present as bleak and niggardly -- almost as if the world is about to come to an end.
Grandparents, parents, teachers and mentors like to tell their inheritors of how glorious the previous times were, and how the world is struggling today -- in matters of food, climate, crime etc and more particularly in manners, attitude, and a more livable society -- almost none of this backed by hard fact.
"Such sentiments are misleading,'' says the liberal philosopher A C Grayling, "because they promise a belief that somewhere or sometime the world had something which has since been lost -- a cosy, chintzy, afternoon-teatime era when there was neither danger without nor unease within. But when we begin rummaging among these myths to provide solutions to present-day troubles, which is what moralisers do, we are in trouble indeed.''
It hardly needs rocket science to understand Grayling's compunctions. A 'hardened' moralising position emerges from insecurity about the present and a fear of the future"
Touche!!!
