Aloha, The story reported by Roland made me think of a string of incidents in Sweden, I thing in the years before the financial crisis, when the sky was the limit in terms of fast enrichment. Now Sweden had been for decades under a fairly strict social democrat regime which ran an extensive welfare state while enforcing social sobriety thru high marginal taxes (somewhere in the 50s the highest marginal bracket was just over ... 100%). Of course, those bent on a fast buck, and especially the young (& usually male) guard was chaffing and engaged in all kinds of 'resistance'. One of the weirdest instances consisted to go to an upmarket venue, order two bottles of Champagne (given the Swedish taxes on alcohol, this was quite an expenditure), share on bottle with friends and order the waiter to empty the other one in the bar sin, just to make sure everyone present was witness both to the wealth of the yong wolves, and their profond despise of the ruling, egalitarian order. When this strange cust om threatened to become a trend, the government issued an ordinance outlawing it.
End of story? Not quite. Roland's, or rather, Ruhi Rawail's story describing a comparable occurrence in a Mumbai restaurant ends with the words: "Thankfully looking and being a Generation that was ....... AS NORMAL AS NORMAL CAN BE" The key word here is 'Generation' - because what the behaviour of the youths indicates is that Rawail's generation may be the last 'normal' one, but theirs is the last. period. Decadence, and a general atmosphere of fake and purposelessness has been witnessed earlier in history, and is a sure sign of the end. Not THE END, or the end of the world, but surely The End Of The World As We Know It - or TEOTWAWKI as the American call it. To me the youth in Mumbai, just as the youth in Stockholm share the same, deepdown feeling of extinction - they're all, in their different ways and behaviour, members of 'the Generation Greta' - which brings us back to the first story. Happy Christmas and New Year to All! p+7D! - there is an attachment to this post, maybe you'll see it, or may be it gets 'scrubbed' ...
