A Generation in Sepia
Picture, if you will, a boy in Madras or Bombay or Delhi in 1978: hair oiled, notebooks stitched, standing in the sodium‑lamp glow of a coaching‑class lane, his future compressed into the neat geometry of entrance‑exam scores and family reputation. Outside, India is half‑awake to the promises of modernity; inside, the boy learns an older catechism—obedience, deference, suppression—as fluently as he learns calculus. The lesson is simple and cruel: feeling is a private defect; performance is a public virtue.
By the time this cohort comes of age in the 1990s, the country has opened to markets but not yet to introspection. Liberalization fills newspapers with acronyms—GDP, FDI, ITES—yet the emotional vocabulary at home remains medieval: “duty,” “family honor,” “adjust.” Careers lengthen like shadows on the office floor; commutes and mortgages metastasize. And somewhere in the narrow space between the caller ID and the dining‑table, a father discovers that there is no sanctioned language for desire, disappointment, or decay—only for resilience and respectability.
What you are meeting now, in the hushed disapproval of uncles and family friends, is the final draft of that syllabus. Their emotional immaturity is not an accident; it is the proud, polished product of several intertwined histories. A colonial pedagogy that trained the “native” professional to be reliable, dutiful, and mute. A post‑Partition culture that treated survival as proof that silence works. An entire educational apparatus that graded children on memorization and conformity, never on curiosity or conscience.
Having spent their youth mastering the art of not feeling too much, these men arrived in middle age armed with promotions and pensions but unarmed for moral complexity. The club and its rituals
This is a generation whose loyalty, as you noted, runs horizontally: to the club, the batch, the society of golf‑shirt men who once crammed for the same exams and now compare the same mutual funds. Within this fraternity, morality is a shared illusion, gently maintained. Your father’s image is not his alone; it is collateral for the group’s self‑respect. To question him is to question their own judgment in having admired, enabled, and occasionally envied him.
The important, unsentimental truth is this: their reactions are a mirror of their caliber. Emotionally and ethically, their reactions sketch a narrow, almost provincial architecture of mind. These are men of low emotional intelligence, not in the fashionable, diagnostic sense, but in a more primitive way: They are conflict‑avoidant and fiercely image‑driven, custodians more than companions. Their loyalty runs horizontally, along the polished bar of the men’s club, not vertically toward truth or the vulnerable. They will raise a glass to the friend, never a hand to the fallen. In that sense, they are guardians of a small fraternity, protecting the club. It is a very modest species of loyalty, and an even smaller species of humanity.