The new generation is a hungry and angry generation. Universally unsettled conditions without promise or prospect confront the new generation in almost every country and continent. The youth or the new generation feels that in the present order of things it simply does not belong, it simply does not add up. It finds itself unwanted and is troubled by blank misgivings in a world which is not its world. It has no tomorrow which it can call its own.

Doubts, discontents, despair, uncertainties, and insecurities stare the new generation in the face. One of the striking phenomena of recent times is student unrest in almost every non-socialist country. The present age is the age of the revolt of youth all over or nearly all over the world. For the youth of today the future is bleak. Employment and economic security, a home and a family life, a set of values which can sustain and support human life-non of these seem to be promised or guaranteed to the overwhelming majority of the rising generation to whom the times seem to be out of joint.

In the first place the generation finds itself ' unwilling to accept the profession and the position of field and factory labourers. Agriculture and industries . are already over-manned and over-crowded. So are the professions belonging to all grades of the liking of the middle classes. The Establishment is closed to the overwhelming majority of the rising generation who find themselves in the outer darkness. The new generation consequently finds itself to be a hopeless and helpless generation. No heroics can avail it. Karl Marx reveals the truth that labor of all sorts was a commodity. Today the labour or the services of millions of youth have become an unwanted commodity. A deadly and a dangerous surplus of manpower has resulted in the tragic fact of unemployment, forced idleness and the fearful prospect of anarchy. This has driven the new generation to despair. Malthus said that while food production increased by arithmetical progression, the population increased by geometrical progression. Consequently, can we not say that while. work which earns food progresses by arithmetical progression, workers grow by geometrical progression?

The older generation seems to have contented itself with old values or with the lack thereof. These values are all but lost. Their meaning, their significance and their charm-these seem to have been played out. A dreariness and a hollowness seem to characterize the old values. Matthew Arnold found himself:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.

TS Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” is an unexaggerated portrayal of the moral crisis and the spiritual vacuum of modern times. And so is his poem “The Wasteland”. We may take these as presenting the dreadful state of affairs created by the Generation Gap.

The new generation of modern youth finds itself unprotected and orphaned. In the West the main cause of the sorry pass to which the new generation has come is the excessive pre-occupation of the older generation with money-making and economic opportunism. This has resulted in the break up or snapping of the ties which bound the older and the newer genefation. The old generation is too breathless and too pre-occupied with its pursuits to keep alive its emotional or psychological living contact with the newer generation. This has resulted in a fatal neglect and in the virtual break-up of family-life and of the home. In Asia, including India, the generation gap has been created by widespread poverty. In Asia the new generation does not know what to do and where to go.

Marx had warned societies and government against the dangers of an unplanned or chaotic economy. Only a socialist society, which is socialist not only in name and form but in purpose and determination, can guarantee to every member gainful employment and a place under the sun. We have, in India, a crying need of teachers, technicians, engineers, doctors, and yet our governments and our Society keep millions of these unemployed. The country needs their service but cannot avail itself of these.

A considerable number of well-trained Indians are finding employment outside the country, resulting in what has been called the ‘brain drain’. We and our government swear by socialism or a socialist pattern of society but we are doing very little to make possible socialism in action. We are all for our Five-Year Plans still largely, very largely purposeless and planless. We have degraded socialism to a pious platitude.

Only determined and purposeful planning can bridge the generation gap. This will be a twice-blessed consummation, blessing both the newer and the older generation and the country as a whole. The tragedy of the situation lies in the fact that we lack the character to make our schemes a success. We seem to have lost the instinct for constructive work. What should have been a planned and purposeful activity has become a meaningless ritual. What should have been really having become a ritual? Formalism and ritualism, resulting from sloth, selfishness, inefficiency, criminal

dishonesty, waste, and do-nothingness disgrace every branch of our activity in the name of education with certificates and degrees we are sending out illiterate, uneducated, unemployable young men and women in millions every year. The police, the judiciary, the executive, the departments in charge of checking corruptions have all become corrupt. Is it any wonder that our new generation is becoming desperate, and in many cases crime-minded? Indian history during the centuries has been a shock-absorbing history. But today with our population of nearly seventy-five crores matters have come to a head and the situation has become explosive. We have to wake up or crack up and go to pieces. We have, in a life-giving manner and with a life-giving technique of planning, to transform our revolting youth into a co-operative youth. We have to fill the generation gap.