Lament For Another World

Mike Klein of Chess.com, reporting on the US Chess Championships, went around asking the participants about Prince.

When I spoke with 12-year-old NM Carissa Yip before the round, she’d never heard of the pop star. I said, “He was big in the 80s and 90s, and one of those stars who went by only one name, like Madonna.”

Yip: “Who’s Madonna?”

This happens more and more to me when I talk to young people these days. They make me feel like I am living in a different age—not just with regard to music and films and books, but also politics and economics. It has been speculated that so many young people support Bernie Sanders in the US because they grew up after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and have no idea of the horrors of socialism. Similarly, in India, I find that many young people who were born in the 90s don’t have the same kind of visceral understanding of how Fabian Socialism crippled us because they were born too late for that. I was an 80s kid, of course—and it’s taken me decades to come to the terms with the fact that I’m not a kid any more.

My musical tastes happen to run older than my generation. Bob Dylan and Van Morrison are still banging on. They’re so clearly from another world that it might as well be fictional, and I might as well be schizophrenic.