Growing up, one doesn’t recall any rebellion or clash of values with parents or the society shaped by the elders of their generation. The ‘generation gap’ was experienced only in retrospect; with the benefit of hindsight.

If there is one word that defines my growing up years, it would be conformism.

We were the proverbial Ziaul Haq children. It was hard to be unaffected by the politics of the country. Everyone, it seems, was conforming to the brutality of the oppressor; some out of conviction, others out of fear. Those who didn’t were the real heroes but they were either incarcerated or became martyrs.

The older generation conformed to the political system; we conformed to them. The personal and the political got mixed in a way that it is difficult to separate even after three decades.

It is not easy, nor fair, to generalise. Each person growing up in that milieu would have his or her own individual reality and may have responded accordingly. In my case, retrospectively again, it seems the generation gap was the prerogative of males alone. The girls on the contrary were obedient, submissive. They may have been surprised, often shocked, at the male privilege within the family but accepted it as a way of life. Often, they were grateful for little mercies. In big towns and cities, girls who were allowed to study beyond the basic graduation degree and get professional qualification were considered lucky.

The older sisters often got the rough part of the deal. Restrictions eased for the younger siblings somewhat but, by then, the message had been clearly sent and understood.

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Again, the political atmosphere only reinforced the values propagated inside families. There were harsh discriminatory laws against women being enacted and implemented. On television screens, the newscasters and announcers appeared with their heads covered, a sudden change from the modernity experienced in the preceding years that soon became a vague memory. In public schools for girls, there were directives issued to make wearing of chaadar mandatory.

Even as children and then adolescents, we could see through the hypocrisy and artificiality of it all.

Our young male contemporaries could defy and question the established order within the family. Their easy mobility and access to more sources of information and entertainment added to their exposure. But this defiance was only up to a certain point; when it came to more serious matters like career or even marriage, they relented. Parents invariably prevailed.

Submission was the model for education as well. Students were supposed to rely on the received wisdom of the teacher in the classrooms. Textbooks were the gospel truth. They weren’t allowed or encouraged to question. Corporal punishment was the norm because it wasn’t obviously questioned. The most interesting students were seen as delinquents and hence punished.

Against this backdrop, there were pockets of resistance.

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There was underground music in every neighbourhood, where the young people, males mostly, got together and learned to play instruments and sing and even dance, against the wishes of the parents and the society at large. There was of course cricket that everyone agreed to.

The girls created their own secluded heavens in every which way; their secret and not-so-secret admirers, the coyness and the readiness, the folded letters thrown their way bringing a beautiful meaning to lives.

Technology, like always, came to the rescue of our generation too. Telephone, the old name for today’s landline, substituted for the lack of mobility among girls. And of course the VCR, almost a revolutionary statement against the state-owned censored PTV -- an open secret of the entire society. The privileged owned it, the less privileged rented it over weekends and holidays, and those like us who couldn’t do both went secretly to people’s houses and watched Indian films mostly.

Our parents were growing up around partition, the self-made generation as I like to call them. They were working hard building their careers; so all they sought for the children was good education. In return, they expected only submission. This was also the saving generation that thought twice before spending a penny. They did buy gadgets but after much deliberation and for life. They saved, we craved.

Paradoxical as it may sound, I started experiencing the ‘generation gap’ not when I should have but much later and it happened in stages. Interestingly, the critical backward glance did not paint everything in black. There were agreements too along with disagreements. There were values and beliefs that we inherited from parents, held on to them consciously and were thankful for those.

I remember, once the political repression started easing and the mind was clearing up, my only grouse against parents and their generation was: how could they let all this happen, how could they tolerate it, why did they not resist it? This too remained unsaid or was uttered in a whisper.

To be fair, they let us grow up with the sense that whatever was happening politically was wrong. They allowed us to be on the right side of politics -- on the side of ideas, people, democracy.

As we grew older, there was this regret that we were not allowed to exercise choice. Many of us ended up in careers selected for us by the parents or wasted a good part of our lives pursuing what we did not want to. That did take away a chunk of our confidence, I feel.

Today, we are trying to be different parents to our children. We give them more choices, more freedoms, than we had. We spend a lot more money than our parents did. We do see a lot of imperfections in the way we are raising them. But they do appear a lot more confident in what they want from life, especially in expressing their rebellion, their clash with our values, their generation’s gap with ours.

The journey goes on.