The next generation

This year has been a year of babies. There has been at least one new baby born every month in my circle of friends and close family and this will continue till the end of this year. We end up visiting all those who are in Delhi and try to keep in touch with those in Mumbai or elsewhere.
Every time I see a new baby lying there, in his or her cocoon, surrounded by glowing parents and grandparents, I feel the love such events generate. The parents are relieved at the end of the pregnancy but the overriding emotion is love. And hope. Hope for all the best things in this world for their newborn. In the small hospital rooms where we usually go to, we end up being part of this envelope of love and hope.
I was born in 1979. The world has changed. The ozone hole was creeping into public limelight while the oil shock was slinking out. The Soviets entered Afghanistan and the US was just waking up to its role of arming its proxies to take on the Soviets. India was resettling in with Indira Gandhi at the helm, after a few unsettling years of Emergency (imposed by her) and the subsequent Janata Dal government. 1984 was still in the future. So was MS-DOS and Bill Gates's fortune. Life is definitely better in India for a lot of people than it was in the 70s and the 80s. But there are things which have changed for the worse also I guess.
Everything will change only faster now. Al Gore's documentary  is depressing. So are the flavours of terrorism - homegrown, imported and vigilante. Will our children see a world where the ice caps will be a 'winter thing'?
Or will we manage to put them through wars - wars about water and land if not about religion and energy resources?
I know that a lot of these scenarios are because of watching disaster movies. But what if one of them is right?