The last generation

What does reading about the all-pervasive and ever-evolving-to-be-human-like Artificial Intelligence and on-the-brink-of-reality Quantum Computing promising huge leaps in technology do? 

In addition to imagining the future, it makes me look back at the past to marvel at how far we have come and how incredibly fast we got here! While reminiscing about my childhood (which seems like an unforeseen side effect of aging, sigh!) and talking to my kids (who are none too happy with the above-mentioned side effect), I realized that there are many things which my generation is the last to witness.

The Waiting Game

First on my list is the rotary telephone along with the bygone phone booths of India. I spent most of my childhood without a telephone in the house. A telephone call struck the balance between the urgency of a telegram (which always induced anxiety) and the delay of a posted letter. If someone needed to talk to us, they would call our neighbor and hang up, who would then come over to tell us, and we would go with them to wait for the call. I clearly remember when we eventually got a landline installed in our house. 

With the lack of mobile phones though, when I moved away for college and needed to call home, I'd have to go to one of those STD phone booths to make a call. Before you even ask, STD here stands for Subscriber Trunk Dialing!

In the current times when just a landline phone is a rarity, I still remember those glorious rotary phones before phones came with press buttons and then were replaced by cordless phones. As kids, it was so much fun to dial these phones that I'd volunteer to dial numbers for people. The sound it made as you dialed the number was super cool! And if your finger slipped as you dialed, you would have to start all over.

Before text messages and especially WhatsApp that has made cross-continental communication so easy that you don't even think about it, there were 'aerogrammes' to send letters to the US from India and 'inland letters' to send letters within India. After my move to the US, those blue aerograms in the mailbox would bring forth happy tears. They carried news from home in the handwriting of your loved ones. The letters would describe goings-on back home and ask questions about my life here. They would mention events and festivities which would have long happened by the time I received the letter. But those letters were the main and tangible connection to home.

No space for backspace

Next up on my list is the typewriter, which I only used briefly. Ironically enough, I enrolled in a "typewriting institute" to learn typing in preparation for using the computer keyboard to type! But the few months I used the typewriter are etched in memory. Imagine not having the backspace key, having to feed the paper and indent paragraphs, moving the roller back with a ding at the end of every line. And the satisfaction of seeing those prongs lift up to imprint the letters on your paper is indescribable.

Old School Media

With all the cool-looking TVs (my favorite is the one that looks like art when not in use), one can be forgiven for not remembering this television set. This is how my first TV looked like and this was the one we crowded in front of when Indira Gandhi was assassinated or every time Chitrahaar or Chitralahari or Ramayan played on the one channel we had - Doordarshan.  You had to get up and get to the TV to turn it on/off or adjust volume. Black & White is just a cool filter these days, but TVs originally were only in B&W.  I don't have vivid memories of B&W TV or the transistor radio - those were probably last witnessed by my parents' generation.

Next on my list is this Murphy radio that sat on a shelf and would be put on the dining table to listen to "Aakashavani Vaarthalu" or devotional and movie songs aired on the radio. Turning the knob to catch a station frequency and being able to listen to your favorite program was the definition of happiness back in the day. Songs played on this radio made the most significant contribution to my Telugu vocabulary. For performers, being a "All India Radio ranked artist" was no less than an award.

The radio was also our connection to sports events. People would hold their radios to their ears to hear live audio commentary about cricket matches, even Olympic events. The commentators would describe the cricket match ball to ball, and not just the game but also the players' and the audience's antics. We would let our imagination soar, picturing the stadium, the crowd, and the games!

Of course, the radio is the perfect segue for the next bunch of items of my list - audio cassettes, CDs, Walkman, Discman, and the tape player. Music, along with the above mentioned items, was/is such a big part of my life that it has its own story.

Long before laptops became ubiquitous and phones made computers redundant, there were the PCs of the 90s - with their clunky monitors and keyboards. You could hear the wheels turning, so to speak, when any command was being executed. Not to forget the good old MS-DOS command prompt.  

When you can get terabytes of storage on fast SSD drives, it's hard to think back to a time of floppy disks on which you would have been happy to store 256MB of data. But that was all we had and we made do with it.

There are also the VCR and video tapes along with film cameras (which by the way are trending again). My children's generation might have very early memories of the video tapes, CDs, and DVDs before streaming became a given, and TiVo DVR that used to record TV shows you couldn't watch when they aired, along with flip phones and the once-revolutionary iPod. I imagine their generation would write a similar post about being the last to see those items in action. Certainly, that post would also include cash and credit cards as relics, typing and handwriting will be seen as lost skills (what with the rise of audio-to-text services and AI composing your texts and mails for you), and researching and writing your own book reports would be so retro!

As much as we innovate and advance, human beings are also nostalgic - often looking fondly on the past whose inconveniences propelled the inventions of today. However, nostalgia is such a powerful emotion that most of the items that are now obsolete have become sort of antiques and sell for a pretty penny.  Many of us have gotten rid of these things as junk, but if we had the foresight to hold on to them, we would have been called collectors! 

Not to worry...we will always have these cherished memories in our hearts to look back on. 

While progress is inevitable, memories are timeless!