Dating amongst millennials

We don’t know how to communicate

There isn’t much meaningful conversation amongst this generation considering most of the exchanged messages contain emoji and you gotta interpret it however best it will suit you and not necessarily the senders target especially in this age of over analyzing tiny details.

We hide behind keyboards

Take for instance a new couple, looking around you will notice they don’t time together but their online accounts show you the ‘relationship goals’ you’d wanna achieve someday. You will find the number of ‘I love you_s in their online accounts exceed the number of times they have actually said it to the people they care about.

No spending time with each other

Yeah sure I know there are get together times like attending festivals which is once in like a year nevertheless during those moments a few percentage of the group would be doing any quality activity together as most of the group will be taking selfies to post for their virtual friends while others will be texting ‘friends’ they’d never meet.

We need honesty

As technology advances the more dishonest we get from lying about our locations, filtering our images to the most pleasing contrast, adding perfect backgrounds and lying to different people at ago.

Everyone is talking/f*ng /dating someone else

Not that am against dating more than a single person I actually think it’s good in a way (topic for another day) but at least let your partner know lest you risk harming yourself or others through diseases, suicides or even physical harms. In this generation, most of us are juggling conversations between partners, sending a single picture to all of them and working hard to keep the other relationship or however we tag it hidden that we end up not enjoying a single one of them

Replacements is one swipe/click/like/follow/add away.

Ever been told “I need space” only to find your ex-partner the next minute filling his/her account with the new catch? Yeah, that’s just how fast replacements is. Finding the next partner just involves turning on your phone and this increases the chances of cheating I mean different flavors are just a click away so why not?!

      Drake said:

“We live in a generation of not being in love,

 And not being together

But we sure make it feel like we’re together

Because we are scared to see each other with somebody else”

                                                                                                                                -Lopode

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The way to graduation

Dennis K. Kazungu

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Being in the university is everyone’s dream. The four-year journey is filled up with a lot of stuff. Sometimes the monotonous academic routine is breaked by fun activities which gives the undergraduate an opportunity to refresh their mind. the lecture business is usually not so intense during the first academic year but keeps on increasing.

With different students in the campus, you will across all manners of sayings, behaviors and habits. In the pursuit of their respective degrees, students have coined a Swahili saying that ‘degree ni harambee’ loosely translated to a degree comes with cooperation. You will also learn and hear crazy slogans and translations of various famous abbreviations. Students especially those doing science courses will joke that the students doing Bachelor of Arts(BA) are doing Bachelor of Anything.

During the graduation day, everything goes on as planned unless the unexpected happen. It is not surprising to find a class that admitted 256 students having 112 only receiving their degrees. After graduation, the new graduands  normally are accompanied by their family and friends to have fun and celebrate their academic achievement in chosen places.

Expectations after studies

Dennis K. Kazungu

 

It is every undergraduate’s expectation to get employed in the field they studied for once the graduate from the university.

Eric Mbaruk, a Diploma in Journalism student at Zetech University College talks to me about about his anticipations once he is done with his studies.

“I expect to get employed in the media industry just like any other graduate would do”. Many students are often optimistic about getting employment in the job market. This forces me to enquire from Mbaruk about how he views his probability of getting into the market soon after his graduation. “It won’t be easy but I believe i have the credentials to be put into considerations by media houses employers”.

He goes on to agree that the field has witnessed recent laying off of workers like the recent retrenchment of journalists by Royal Media Services. “There many challenges. We recently had journalists retrenched from Citizen”

Mbaruk completes the interview with me by telling saying that what he fears most i to be fired.”If there is something I fear most, it is to be fired”.

Campus connect

Dennis K. Kazungu 

Campus connect is a joint end of year entertainment event between the students of Multimedia University of Kenya and Catholic University of East Africa.

The two campuses geographically close to each other have decided to organise a joint bash that will see attendees closing the year in style. The common place of the event will be Park Place grounds. The event scheduled to happen on Friday 2nd December 2016 will be graced by performances from Kenyan hip hop act Octopizzo and hitmaker Timmy TDat. Radio Citizen’s Mzazi Willy M. Tuva will emcee the event. Advance tickets are going for Ksh. 300 each while at the gate a ticket goes for Ksh. 500.

The entertainment secretaries of the two institutions have come together to give ‘comrades’ an end of year ‘throw’ as they wind up their September-December semester.

Matatu culture

Dennis K. Kazungu 

Matatu, a Swahili word for ‘mapeni matatu’, thirty cents, a flat fair charged in the 1960s is the word used to refer to the PSV minibuses operating on Kenyan roads. More than fifty years later, the matatu transport industry has experienced a lot of transformation.

In the quest of trying to outsmart their competitors, matatu owners have evolutionized the matatu transport industry by featuring decorated portraits of the famous and popular slogans and sayings. The matatus are also pimped with graffiti-style artwork, custom designs, flashy lights and onboard entertainment. The passengers are entertained by the screens installed inside those vehicles playing latest attractive music videos enough to make one to easily forget to alight at their destinations. They mostly appeal to the youth.

The 125 Ongata Rongai route matatus is a good example of this culture. With the route made up of many youth as the passengers of the universities around (Multimedia University of Kenya, Catholic University of East Africa, Africa Nazarene University and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Karen campus), matatu operators are reaping enough from it. It is not a surprise to find a university student along Magadi road waiting to board a pimped matatu for forty minutes and leaving the 14-passenger PSVs to go unfilled.

The matatus have created a culture that the youth have embraced as they consider it fashionable and classy. It is recently that the matatu culture awards were introduced and we had ‘Catalyst’ named the ‘Street King’ in the Nganya Awards that happened in August 2016.

 

The crazy comrades

Dennis K. Kazungu

David Wood’s intelligence wouldn’t have manifested itself in a better way than when he discovered that, “College is the best time of your life.” When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night.” Kenyan University students live to such expectations and haven’t let David Wood down even a single drop. ‘COMRADES’, a name they have embraced and branded themselves with, aids them in coming up with the mother of all mad quotes that ‘a comrade is always right’ and ‘a comrade is never wrong’. The quotes simply imply that it is none of your damn business as a neutral observer to question the sanity of their deeds. A much crazier species will tell you that you don’t have even a single clue of where their fees come from let alone their entertainment money.
The first years of these institution alias ‘freshers’ spend quite a good chunk of their days and nights trying to ‘belong’. Diversity in the places they come from whether from a village that nobody is sure of the definition of the word university or to the ones who come from our lawmakers’ homes makes it compulsory for them to adjust to the new environment. This period of adjustment doesn’t expose them fully to the ‘fun’ in our campus. The second year leads the commencement of everything that is good and bad in campus. It is at this period that students’ really belong to the cultures of the university. At this time, ladies will tell you the latest dressing trends in town that is seductive and translucent whereas the male comrades will tell you the best body shapes and how to distinguish them. The ladies will comprehensively tell you the best lit rooms in the male students’ hostels. Their male counterparts will categorically tell you which lass sleeps on which bed in which room.

When it comes to having ‘fun’, partying is an understatement. These comrades who can’t recall which lecture came last on Friday and which one comes first on Monday, will always know which drinking parlour brews the sweetest liquor. They will be aware when there are free drinks at every pub yet they can’t recall when their assignment are due. Their rate of smoking can comfortably beat a diesel powered generator to a competition. The toxics they inhale and exhale leave them emitting hazardous fumes than those emitted by unroadworthy vehicles. It will come as no surprise if NEEMA decides to name them as part of the escalating environmental degradation. Their busy lifestyle makes them celebrate the night after examination results are out, not because they scored As but because they narrowly escaped resits.

Describing the average life of a comrade in a one page article is hard bearing in mind we have our ‘religious’ brethren who are not that holy, but that is a story of another day.