What is reality today will be nostalgia tomorrow! So many things that older generations grew up with, have no meaning for kids these days. It is rather sad that children today will never know the joys of some things that older people grew up with, such as:
Using a pencil to wind a cassette
Cassette who? Sigh! They use iPods now so the tape will never come unspooled, nor will there ever be any need to wind up the tape using that pencil that fit just so perfectly within that toothed circle! Or creating those mixed tapes to profess your true feelings for that special someone.
Film cameras
Alas, kids today will never know the stress of struggling to catch the perfect shot on a camera because there are only 36 exposures, no deleting or retakes and no preview screen or (gasp) selfies!
TV without remote controls
We had Doordarshan then. People laughed in derision, when a TV with a remote control or with more than two channels was suggested.
Greeting cards
On birthdays and festivals, you wish people in other cities and countries via Whatsapp or Facebook and if you really, really love them, you Skype with them. But go out, buy a greeting card, use a pen to write, stick a stamp and post it? Why?
Typewriters
“Fascinating! So you used a machine where you couldn’t delete, redo, undo, spell check, justify, change fonts or font size? You must have been a genius!” Yes, I heard this said.
The floppy disk
This one even puzzled me: after all it wasn’t ‘floppy’. But what kids today don’t get is, how could you get by on a memory device that stored 240 MB at a maximum!
Video cassette library
This thing sent Bollywood into decline in the 1980s but no kid today ever saw those stores that some of us visited in delightful anticipation, sometimes hiring a VCR (never seen that either) to watch movies all night!
The Encyclopedia Britannica
Kids Google things these days; they have no concept of the kind of awe that the complete Encyclopedia Britannica inspired or how envious kids those days were of other kids whose parents could afford the home version!
Spinning a Lattu
Sure they have the battery operated spinning tops but if asked to do it the old-fashioned way, kids these days would be stumped!
Looking up a directory
The yellow pages? What are those? In fact, what is a phone book? And remembering phone numbers and actually dialling them? Whatever for!
