It seeps in through insignificant things.
The smell of summer showers, passing though a mango cart, a certain song from
ten years back, the sight of an Enid Blyton paperback. Maybe its because of all
the ‘what’s next’ questions – What’s next was never a huge deal all these
years. At least that’s how it feels now.
The ‘Next’ usually followed with minimum
fuss- After 6th standard came summer vacations and then 7th
standard. After school came play time and then homework time. After dinner came
family television time. After exams came
excitement and water fights.
Whether we got bored of these patterns, I
don’t really remember. But looking back, it seems an idyllic existence. Having
actual hours in a school day allotted for games and music and reading, having
annual school picnics and parties, having nothing too pressing to worry about
except maybe the marks of the Hindi unit test or a minor squabble with one of
the friends in the ‘group’. We may have not had the even more seemingly ‘idyllic’
childhood of a generation ahead with climbing mango trees and playing with tops
and spending vacations at a ‘native place’ with a horde of cousins, but we had
our own set of now outdated activities. Buying audiocassettes of new movies or
albums, borrowing walkmans (walkmen?) for trips, reading horoscopes for the day
at the back of the weight token at railway stations, playing brick games on a
handheld ‘video game’ and sometimes being treated to the ones where you could
shoot ducks on the TV from a ‘gun’. When we hadn’t a clue about pizzas and
pastas and soufflés and the only main concession to our regular food was the
occasional Maggi Noodles, and the only foreign cuisine we vaguely knew was
Chinese . When we did have fancy board games and the occasional computer game
but if just given a piece of chalk, could still pass a pleasant hour playing
hopscotch. When we did watch a lot of cartoons but still ( at least most of us)
loved Famous Fives and Secret Sevens and spent many a day exploring Cornish
moors and secret underground passages with them. ( This of course, was before
Harry Potter happened, which was soon to overtake most school conversations.)
I remember reading an Isaac Asimov short
story about a time in the future when there is a man who ‘claims’ he can do
things like multiplication without a calculator, and astonishes people by
getting the right answer, and leading to the realisation that the brain can
actually be a substitute to the computer.
In the hope that we don’t live to see that
day, though nostalgic posts of twenty years hence might talk about the times we
actually had to type on a keyboard, and how we used Facebook and Skype to
communicate, and how we transferred data using things like memory cards and pen
drives, the floppy disks of tomorrow, and how we played Angry Birds on
touchphones, how we were fascinated by Siri, and how we still did quaint things
like going to bookstores and buying printed books.
