Striving Towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

The colonisers did not merely take our wealth. They took something far more difficult to reclaim.

They rewired the mind. Taught us to mistake our knowledge for superstition, and our confidence for arrogance. It is one thing to lose a harvest, a treasury, a trade route. Such losses, however staggering, are eventually recoverable, given enough time and enough will. But to lose one’s own reflection, to look inward and see only what the coloniser trained you to see, is a different order of theft entirely. Wealth, once plundered, can be rebuilt. A wound to the sense of self is not so easily mended. It lingers long after the ledgers are settled, long after the flags have changed, passed quietly from one generation to the next like an inheritance no one asked to receive and no one quite knows how to refuse.

Our parents inherited that wound.

They came of age in the shadow of Partition, of Emergency, of ration cards and waiting lists, in an era where survival was not a choice one made but a condition one simply endured. There was a certain unspoken arithmetic to their lives: get a job, pay the bills, educate the children, see them married, repeat. Not because they lacked imagination, but because imagination is itself a luxury, and luxury was not on offer. There was no room left for self-actualization when the day’s real labor was putting food on the table. Philosophy, dreams, the search for meaning, these are the concerns of those who have already eaten. Famine does not permit such questions; it only permits the answering of one, the same one, every single day: how do we get through today.

And so they gave us what they themselves never had: options.

They climbed one rung of the ladder, often at great and invisible cost, so that we might climb two more. They secured food, clothing, shelter, the bare architecture of survival, so that we could afford to think beyond it. It is worth pausing here, to consider what that climb actually required of them. It required swallowing dreams before they had even fully formed. It required choosing the safe path over the interesting one, the certain wage over the uncertain calling, again and again, for decades, without complaint, or at least without complaint we were ever allowed to witness. That silence was not the absence of longing. It was longing, disciplined into duty.

Because of that discipline, we inherited the right to ask a question they never had the leisure to ask: not “will I survive,” but “what do I want.” It is astonishing, when you think about it, how recent and how fragile that question really is in our family histories. It is not an ancient right. It is a gift, paid for in a particular currency, decades of a parent’s foreclosed possibility.

And we did ask it. We found meaning, purpose, community. We built careers that were not merely about salary, but about identity, contribution, even joy. We chose partners rather than accepting matches, trusting our own judgment of the heart over the wisdom of aunties and horoscopes. We traveled, we questioned, we grew, each freedom a small monument to a sacrifice that was rarely spoken of and even more rarely thanked.

Then we, in turn, gave our children even more.

Our children now sit higher on that same ladder than we ever did. They question authority as a matter of course, not rebellion. They challenge the inherited grind we once glorified as virtue, sensing correctly that endurance alone is not the same thing as a life well lived. They are playing an entirely different game, one where mental health outweighs job security, and passion is valued above pension, where a job that pays well but empties the soul is no longer considered a reasonable trade. Good for them. It is, in many ways, the very outcome our parents’ sacrifices were meant to purchase, even if they could not have imagined its exact shape.

And yet, here is where the reckoning grows complicated.

We look back on our parents through the lens of today, armed with the vocabulary of therapy, the fluency of self-awareness, the frameworks of boundaries and attachment styles they never had access to, could not have named even if they had somehow intuited them. And too often, we judge them for it, quietly if not aloud. For what we call a failure of parenting. For the suppression of emotion. For all they did not, or perhaps could not, give us. We hold up the language of a generation raised in relative safety and measure it against the actions of a generation raised in relative siege, and we are surprised, even indignant, when the measurements do not align.

But what if they gave us precisely what they had to give?

What if survival, by its very nature, offers no luxury for emotional intelligence? A person cannot pour from a reserve they were never permitted to build. What if a mother working through the night simply to keep the lights on has no bandwidth left over to sit cross-legged with a child’s feelings, however much love might have wished otherwise, however deeply she may have wanted to? Perhaps what looked to us like emotional absence was, in truth, emotional exhaustion, a candle burned so completely at both ends that there was simply no flame left for softer things.

Every generation builds the one that follows it. And in the very act of building, every generation breaks something too. This is not a flaw in the system. It may, in fact, be the system itself, the only mechanism by which anything changes at all.

Our parents were resilient, tireless, unshakeable. But in forging that resilience, they also passed down fear, rigidity, a certain distance from feeling, not out of cruelty, but out of necessity worn so long it hardened into habit, and then into inheritance. We, their children, became self-aware, expressive, intentional. But we inherited our own affliction in turn: an anxious mind, an overthinking heart, a paralysis born of too much choice, too many roads where our parents had only one. It is a strange kind of privilege, to be undone by options they never had the chance to be undone by. Our children will carry their own gifts forward as well, and their own particular damage, quietly folded into an inheritance they will one day try, and likely fail, to fully name, just as we are trying and largely failing now.

I see this most clearly now, as a parent myself, standing squarely between the generation that survived and the generation that questions everything. I see my parents’ flaws with an unflinching clarity that comes easily in hindsight. I see my own with considerably less comfort, since hindsight has not yet arrived to soften them. And I know, with a certain quiet humility, that one day my children will see mine too, through a lens I cannot yet even imagine, built from a vocabulary that likely does not exist yet, judging choices I am making with the best information and the least wisdom I will ever have at once.

But perhaps the aim was never perfection. Perhaps it never could be. Perhaps the aim, all along, was only ever progress, uneven, incomplete, and passed forward imperfectly, the way a relay baton changes hands mid-stride, sometimes fumbled, but never entirely dropped.

Our parents gave us stability. We are giving our children freedom. Their children, in turn, will give the world something we have not yet even found the words for, some virtue or repair we cannot presently name because we do not yet know what wound it will be responding to. And perhaps that is simply how it must work, each generation completing a sentence the last one could only begin, none of us ever quite finishing the book, only handing it forward, a little further along than we found it.

So before we sit in judgment of the generation that came before us, perhaps we might pause. Perhaps we might remember that they were playing an entirely different game, by different rules, on a harder board than the one we now stand upon, with fewer instruments, less light, and far less permission to fail.

They did not fail us.

They simply did not yet have the manual we are only now beginning to write, one page at a time, mistakes and all, for children who will one day write their own.