NATURE’S great events, like how salmon swim thousands of miles upriver, evading grizzly bears as they leap mightily over the waterfalls, really come to life when you watch them on high-definition TV.

Until such time when I can watch such events up close and personal, I have been upgrading my collection of nature DVDs, especially those hosted by David Attenborough, to the Blu-ray versions.

We live in a time when we have seen immense paradigm shifts in the way information can be shared.

For example, I have watched some of the same movies in the cinema on videotape, VCD, VCD with DVD qua­lity, DVD, Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray and streamed live over the Internet.

We used to have to wait years for cables to be laid so that a telephone can be installed in our house.

The simple telephone has now evolved into a smartphone which can do just about everything, and even then, it has to compete with various social media platforms that make communication so instanta­neous and simple.

The fact that I occasionally chat with my 89-year-old mother on Skype makes me wonder if the impact of such changes is even more dramatic from her point of view.

But amid all these changes, we are also reminded that some things are so foundational that they remain the same.

So we talk, among other things, about the joy of living, the thirst for knowledge, the respect for one another despite our differences and the simple courtesies of life.

Yes, indeed these are the values that should stand the test of time, but do they?

A friend was lamenting about the lost generations and why history is replete with such examples. And it is clear that things just get lost when the current generation does not think it is important for them to be passed on to the next.

For example, if we want to ensure that our children have the thirst for knowledge, are we prepared to sit down with them and help them develop skills like critical thinking and acute observation?

Attenborough can teach us about the most amazing things that happen in nature but we leave the teaching of science solely to the teachers in school, and then lament that the children are just learning via textbooks without any real-life experience.

And how do we pass on the common courtesies of life to the next generation, when our day-to-day existence simply reveals that we do not extend such courtesies to the people around us?

I have observed that many people do not know how to say thank you, sorry or please. And such common courtesies are not just about saying those actual words, but expressing them through our actions.

We tell our children not to break the law and then drive pass a red light, or even argue passionately for the right to break a law.

We often tell the young ones how they must live right because the future belongs to them and to the generations to come. Yet we carry on damaging the present because we are such a “me, my, mine” generation.

The salmon that swim upriver yearly do so because they are guided by some inner sensory perception to head back to the place they were born some four years earlier. And then they die. But not without first spawning the next generation.

What do we, the current generation, actually leave behind? Success stories that simply fade with time, or long-lasting legacies that continue to be passed on from one generation to the next?

> Deputy executive editor Soo Ewe Jin is reluctant to switch to 3D TV because that might make him forsake the 3D world out there, which gives real meaning to what life is all about.

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