कल (kal)

I love the way words are like little definition puzzles. Understanding how a word got from a series of syllables to a having a concrete definition can always be a fun ride. It’s even more fun when you take it overseas. I love having my multicultural friends explain what words mean in their languages. My favorite part is asking them about the untranslatable words, the Spanish, German, Arabic, Korean, word that turn into be a phrases when expressed in English. The words that embody an idea that takes so many more to explain itself. I have one of these in my own language, my favorite Hindi word, कल (pronounced kal). The word कल means both tomorrow and yesterday, leaving listeners to figure out which one it is depending on tense and context. A concept difficult to grasp for my friend found unbelievable until the following:

I’ve always loved this word, mainly because of the idea that it represents. In Hindi, tomorrow and yesterday are the same. Past and future meld into one, what you did before and what you’re going to do now are both expressed through the same word. It readjusts your view to thinking in terms of today and everything else. There’s just now, and the rest of it.

It really encourages you to live in the moment, a notion that’s been on my mind a lot recently. Like my fellow collegiate friends, I frequently find myself discussing “the power of living in the moment” or many other common post-modernist talking points that have always been found on college campuses.

I think about it a lot, the environment and people I’m surround by. It tastes like idealism, with some rebellion sprinkled in, and is soaked in hopefulness. But what worries me is how ancient the recipe seems. I worry that all this idealism, struggle for positive change in the world, is just a side effect of being “the Youth”. A natural reaction to reaching adulthood while still hanging on to the hopes of adolescence, that’ll fade out by the end of the decade.

Oddly unsustainable optimism.

This thought depressed me for a long time. I’d worry that all the enthusiasm and energy with which I approach my life, education, and future career would eventually wane. Every day I would get further away from this age, and the vitalizing, revolutionizing feeling that comes with it. It felt like growing up meant the passion that comes with youth had to age too.

I hated the finite nature of those catalyzing feelings.

But then I realized, just because the attitudes of youth eventually disappear doesn’t mean they aren’t a powerful force. Throughout the years young people, in the short time that they stay that way, have shaped entire generations. In the 60s, youth brought about the Love Revolution affecting the music, politics, writing, and every other cultural aspect of the decade. Even today, young people all around the Middle East use the technologies they’ve grown up with, social networking sites, to bring about dramatic change in the nations governments.

Youth has power, youth can bring change and being in this chapter of my life I feel like I have a sense of responsibility to my generation. When I turned twenty, an older friend said something to me that galvanized this feeling, “On my 20^th birthday all I was thinking was, this is the beginning of the most life-shaping decade of my life.”

And he was right, this is the most directionally defining decade of my life.

So this is my advice to all the young people sharing my sense of social responsibility, wanting to catalyze some sort of change in this world before you become obsolete.

Forget about कल for a while, because all we have is today to make a lasting difference.