“Finally got my hands on the new Potter book. Can’t wait to read it!”

“OMG! I literally screamed when the Amazon guy delivered the Cursed Child!” 

“Goodbye world! Talk to y’all tomorrow.”

These could very well be messages from my 15-year-old cousins back in Chandigarh. Except they’re not. They are just three of the many status messages flooding my Facebook newsfeed as I write this. 

Now, we all know that Harry Potter And The Cursed Child just released, and it looks like all my friends are really keen to know how things have been rolling in the wizarding world. Even the We-Hardly-Use-Facebook bandwagon has suddenly come out of nowhere, grandly announcing that they’ve read the book in one night. ONE NIGHT!

Source: elcomercio.pe

Which got me thinking. Have we – the ’90s kids – really refused to grow up?

Kids these days don’t know the excruciating wait for a new Harry Potter book that could stretch on for months and years (no, the wait for the new season of GoT doesn’t count). They haven’t experienced the excitement of finally getting their hands on the book. They don’t know what it’s like to stay up all night and read it in one sitting. 

But we’ve been there and done that. And we don’t mind doing it over and over again, even when we are twenty fucking five.

And that’s the thing about us ’90s kids. We keep our Harry Potters and our Finding Dorys close to our hearts. We love our Pikachus and Charmenders and we take them very, very seriously. We get nostalgic about Looney Tales and Captain Planet and love pithoo more than we’ll ever love Angry Birds. 

So where does this leave us? Have we really grown up? Will we ever grow up?

We crib about how TV these days is ruining the good ol’ Cartoon Network as we knew it. 

Sitting at work, trying our best at this ‘adult life’ thing, we share articles about how ’90s was the best time ever.

Our playlists might be full of EDM, but every time we get drunk, all we need is a little dose of Daler Mehendi’s Tunak Tunak Tun and nothing makes us dance more than Sukhbir’s beats of Oh ho ho ho ho.

No matter how many seasons of GoT we obsess over, our hearts still want to watch another re-run of F.R.I.E.N.D.S and hear Joe say How You Doin’ ONE MORE TIME! 

One photo of a trump card or a Camel Geometry box is all it takes to send us on a trip down memory lane. 

So why is it that the ’90s kids are so obsessed with the ’90s? Have we refused to grow up? Or do we just suck at being adults? What is it that still keeps us connected to the ’90s?

Well, we might just have the answer…

We are the ‘in-between generation.’ The generation that’s seen the best of both worlds. 

We’ve used a tape recorder just as much as we’ve been addicted to iPods. We’ve enjoyed long calls on landlines, and also gone crazy with the unlimited SMS recharge pack. We have drooled over Poppins, Nutties and Rola Cola as much as we have over Pulse and Hokey Pokey.

b’Source: ‘

We’ve filled scrapbook after scrapbook before we got addicted to Facebook. And laughed our asses off to Movers And Shakers way before we laughed to Kapil Sharma’s jokes on Comedy Nights. The joy of using a VCR is as important to us as is the convenience of downloading a movie using torrents. Our collections of trump cards and tazos make us just as proud as our collection of movies on our hard drives. We’ve excitedly put on a Bubble Gum fake tattoo and also felt the pain of getting a real one. 

The very best of both worlds. 

We’ve seen so much technological advancement happen during our childhood that we remember things that are now totally obsolete but we can’t get them back. From computers to mobile phones, so much was happening around that it all zoomed past us in a jiffy. 

Well, we can’t get it back, but what we can do is get nostalgic. And get nostalgic, we do! That’s the thing about nostalgia. When the excitement about the new things dies out, you pine for the old ones. 

But that’s not all that there is to our generation. 

While we might be pining for the ’90s, we’re definitely not just a bunch of sad adults. We are a generation of artists and writers. We’ve broken the conventional mould of the doctor-engineer-lawyer drill. We’ve pushed the age for marriage. We care, and we protest. We don’t shy away from discussing public policy. 

So, it is is not that we refuse to grow up. We stubbornly want to keep our childhood alive. And we will continue to do so for as long as we can.  

Nothing probably sums up the ’90s kids more than DJ’s dialogue from Rang De Basanti…

Except the moot part which is more or less a moo point! ‘Cause the way I see it, we are pretty much slaying it!