The various generations in popular mind

Many of us have often wondered how the names like the "greatest generation" or the "baby boomers" came about to define entire generations.'Time magazine devoted an entire issue to describing these "generations". I was curious to see if the generations* in India fell into some pattern.

In popular mind the various generations in western society are :

The Silent Generation was the generation born between the two World Wars, who were too young to join the service when World War II started. Many had fathers who served in World War I. It was coined in the November 5, 1951 cover story of Time to refer to the generation within the United States coming of age at the time. The article, (which defined the generation at the time as born from 1923 to 1933), found its characteristics as grave and fatalistic, conventional, possessing confused morals, expecting disappointment but desiring faith, and for women, desiring both a career and a family.

The Greatest Generation is a term for those Americans who fought in World War II, as well as those who kept the home front intact during it. Some of those who survived the war then went on to build and rebuild United States industries in the years following the war.

Baby Boomers. The Baby Boomers were the generation born just after World War II, a time that included a 14-year increase in birthrate worldwide. Following World War II, several English-speaking countries -- the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand -- experienced an unusual spike in birth rates, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the baby boom. Baby Boomers in their teen and college years were characteristically part of the 1960s counterculture, but later became more conservative, eventually gave birth to Generations X and Y. Most academic and demograpic literature uses 1946 and 1964 as the cutoff years of the Baby Boom generation

The Hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the early 1960s and spread around the world. These people created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis and LSD to explore alternative states of consciousness.

Generation X . Generation X is the generation born between approximately 1964 to 1980, and connected to the pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s they grew up in. The term has been used in demography, the social sciences, and marketing, though it is most often used in popular culture. Other names used interchangeably with Generation X are 13th Generation and Baby Busters. Awareness of this generation began in the early 1990s, with cultural touchstones like the Lollapalooza Festival and grunge band Nirvana's song Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Time Magazine Magazine's 1990 cover story titled "Twentysomething", signaling the advent of a new generation of young adults in the Western World who are influenced by fashion trends, music, and slang terms shown in music videos on the newly created cable channel MTV. 

Boomerang Generation is one of several terms applied to the current generation of young adults in Western culture, born approximately between 1975 and 1986. They are so named for the frequency with which they choose to cohabitate with their parents after a brief period of living alone - thus boomeranging back to their place of origin. This cohabitation can take many forms, ranging from situations that mirror the high dependency of pre-adulthood to highly independent, separate -household arrangements. The term can also be used to indicate only those members of this age-set that actually do return home, not the whole generation.

Generation Y . Generation Y, sometimes referred to as "Millennials, "Echo Boomers", or jokingly as "Generation Why?", refers to the cohort of individuals born, roughly, between 1982 and 1994.These are usually the children of Baby Boomers and people in early Gen X. Generation Y grew up with many world-changing events including the rise of mass communication and the Internet. The Y Generation is known as a Culture War "battleground" with growing disagreements between conservative and progressive perspectives. 1976-2001 is the widest possible definition commonly cited, but generally speaking this generation starts with the 1980s and ends in the middle of the 1990s.

Generation Z is the generation of people living in Western or First World cultures that follows Generation Y. Experts differ on when the earliest members of Generation Z were born, ranging from 1990 to 2001, though a majority opinion claims about 1996. Several other names have been used to refer to this population group, including "Generation V" (for virtual), "Generation C" (for community or content), "Generation Cox", "The New Silent Generation", the "Internet Generation", the "Homeland Generation", or even the "Google Generation."

In the Indian context, the generations are different:

"Freedom fighters". India was free in 1947 from the British Empire but the country lost many men and women who were filled with undaunted courage and spirit of patriotism known popularly as the freedom fighters. The pioneers of the freedom movement were Mangal Pandey, Tantia Tope, Rani of Jhansi and the great Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi who introduced non-violent ways of fighting the enemy. Other notable freedom fighters of India are Sarar Patel, Annie Besant, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bhagat Singh, Bipin Chandra Pal, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Chandrashekhar Azad, Sarojini Naidu, Dadabhai Naoroji, Sucheta Kriplani, Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari. 

"Nehru's nation builders". After independence Nehru the first prime minister issued a sterling call to the nation to build temples of democracy. A whole generation (eg  Haksar, Lavraj Kumar, Kurien, Sarabhai etc)  followed his call and these were the nation building generation.

"Indira's pragmatists". With the dominance of the public sector, India went through an economic regime that was labelled derisively as "the hindu rate of growth". Nationalization of private sector took place and many from the private sector( Prakash Tandon, Pathak,  SMPatil, etc) joined the public sector. The experiment was not a great success.

" Money is honey" generation: Entry of the Private sector. In the 1980's there was a move toward allowing the private sector greater leeway. Ambanis became the poster child of this era replacing the traditional houses of Tatas and Wadias. But so did Harshad Mehta and others who manipulated the stock markets.

"The go go years/anything goes". In early 1990 India was in financial shock so some shock therapy was applies in that the economy was opened up to the world. What followed were the golden years for the private sector. It seemed everbody was dealing in stocks and shares. But lack of adequate regulation soon extracted a price.

"The tree huggers".  Birth of social movements/environment/social issues and rise of the NGO's. Soon a collapse occured in the financial system with numerous scams (Fertilizer, Mumbai land grab etc) coming to light. This led to the birth of a number of popular movements in the area of environment and social causes.( Narmada Dam, etc). Arundhati was one of the better known leader of these campaigns.

" Aam aadmi" . The middle class decides to enter the hurly burly of political campaigns and public life. With the breakdown of political system, the middle class finally woke up and this began the advent of popular movements to reform the government with corruption as its main target. Anna Hazare, an old Gandhian took the lead in the fight against corruption but soon Arvind Kejriwal took over and formed the Aam Aadmi party.

* Usually, a familial generation is defined as the number of years equivalent to the average age of a mother at the times she has her children, which for the sake of convenience is traditionally regarded as 25 years.