Every generation grows up with a certain set of values that become their defining characteristics. For my parents’ generation, the midnight’s children, those values were hope and survival. What my generation considered perseverance and adaptability was nothing but fear: The fear of authority, the fear of not being allowed to make it, of being singled out, of being left behind. Our grand ambition had simply been to get past the door before the doorman shuts it on us, too bad for the ones left behind. We who grew up in pre-liberalised India knew what scarcity was, and the psychological imprint it left on us was the ever-lurking fear of losing it all once again.