New Coastie – Accessing my grandparents forever

In my last column I talked about my impending fatherhood and how my frame of reference for life is going to shift once my pēpē arrives. 

Strangely, the imminent arrival of the new baby has made me start thinking about my ultimate departure from this planet. I am sure it is not happening soon, but you never know. I am banking on the technological advancements of our time to at least be an immortal being as a set of AI style algorithms on a USB stick or in The Cloud. A USB stick that you can just plug in the computer and talk to me. As far as “The Cloud” is concerned, I still have no clue what it is and where it exists. I can only imagine a white fluffy formation in the sky with all the world’s information.

My digital fountain of youth type of thinking is not because of some narcissistic need to live forever, even though I do find the concept of death a bit daunting. It is because the idea of preserving a human’s consciousness fascinates me. It is also because I would love to have access to my grandparents and great grandparents whenever I can. They all lived through the partition of India in 1947. They went through national turmoil, liberation struggle, migration, loss, and nation building. In their lifetimes they had their dreams realised in the form of the departure of the British Raj, but then those dreams were crushed by the disappointments of the new country deeply impacted by the remnants of colonisation. Through all that, they also managed to raise my parents, who raised me. I have done well, and I am extremely privileged.

Imagine being able to access that experience forever. I think of that whenever I am told to go back to where I came from. How would my grandparents and great grandparents, who uprooted themselves from their homeland in what is now India to what is now Pakistan, deal with it?

As a young whipper snapper, I did not acknowledge the treasures that were living in our home. They are just the grandparents who are always there. They have always been there; they don’t know about anything modern. Now that they have passed on, almost every day I think about them and wonder how they would deal with the life predicaments that I face during my life.

The growing narratives of blaming our ancestors for the current ills of our society disturbs me a little. Every generation makes mistakes. They try to make the best with the cards that they were dealt. The responsibility then sits with the newer generations to learn from those mistakes and make things better. Demonising our elders for our current predicaments presents us with the danger of isolating them as a blamed generation and missing the opportunity to learn from them. 

They might have not come onboard with some of the societal development that we have adopted. That doesn’t mean that we cut them off from our discourse. It is our responsibility to talk to them and learn from them before they are gone and the treasure that they carry for decades of life experience goes with them.