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1.. Though you may not publicly own to
this, at the age of 5-8 years, you were very proud of your
first "Bellbottom" or your first "Maxi"
2. Phantom & Mandrake were your only
true heroes. You can also nod your heads to names like
Chandamama, Champak, Lot-Pot, Nandan. The brainy ones read
"Competition Success Review".
3. You took pride in turning to the
back page of your latest Amar Chitra Katha and ticking off
yet another title. How many you ticked, you still had many
to go.
4. Your "Camlin" geometry box & Flora
pencil was your prized possession.
5. The only "Holidays" you took were to
go to your grandparents' or your cousins' houses.
6. Ice-cream meant only - either an
orange stick, a vanilla softy in a cone or at most - a Choco
Bar if you lived in a swanky town.
7. Your first family car (and the only
one) was a Fiat or an ambassador. This often had to be
pushed by the entire family to get going.
8. The glass windows in the back seats
used to get stuck at the two-thirds down level and used to
irk the shit out of you! The window went down only if your
puny arm could manage the tacky rotary handle to pull it
down. Locking the door was easy. You just whacked the other
tacky, on-rotary handle downwards.
9. Your mom had stitched the weirdest
lace curtains for all the windows of the car. They were tied
in the middle and if your dad was the comfort-oriented
kinds, you had a magnificent small fan upfront, below which
screwed to the board was the cassette player.
10. Your parents were proud owners of
HMT watches. You "earned" yours after 8th or the 10th
standard exams.
11. You have been to "Jumbo Circus" ;
have held your breath while the pretty young thing in the
glittery skirt did acrobatics, quite enjoyed the elephants
hitting football, the motorcyclist vrooming in the "Mautka
Gola" and it was politically okay to laugh your guts out at
dwarfs hitting each other's bottoms!
12. You have atleast once heard "Hawa
Mahal" on the radio.
13. If you had a TV, it was normal to
expect the neighborhood to gather around to watch the
Chitrahaar or the Sunday movie. If you didn't have a TV, you
just went to a house that did. It mattered little if you
knew the owners or not.
14. Sometimes the owners of these TVs
got very creative and got a bi or even a tri-coloured
anti-glare screen which they attached with two side clips
onto their Weston TVs. That confused the hell out of you!
15. Black & White TVs weren't so bad
after all because cricket was played in whites.
16. You thought your Dad rocked because
you got your own ( the family's; not your own!) colour TV
when the Asian Games started. Everyone else got the same
idea as well and ever since, no one came over to your house
and you didn't go to anyone else's.
17. You dreaded the death of any
political leader because of the mourning they would announce
on the TV. After all how much "Shashtriya Sangeet" can a kid
take? Salma Sultana also didn't smile during the mourning.
18. You knew that "Indira Gandhi" was
somebody really powerful and terribly important. And that's
all you needed to know.
19. The only "Gadgets" in the house
were the TV, the Fridge and the Mixie..
20. All the gadgets had to be duly
covered with a crochet covers and sometimes even with
ingenious, custom-fit plastic covers.
21. Movies meant Amitabh Bachchan. Before the start of the
movie you always had to watch the obligatory "newsreel".
22. You thought you were so rocking
because you knew almost all the songs of Abba and BoneyM
23. You had a turntable "stereo" and a
collection of LP Records. Your hormones went crazy when you
bought "Disco Deewane" by Naziya Hassan & Zoheb Hassan.
24. You couldn't contain your happiness
when you suddenly had knowledge of Grammy awards and Tina
Turner, Cyndi Lauper & OMG even Michael Jackson became
familiar names.
25. School teachers, your parents and
even your neighbors could whack you and it was all okay.
26. Photograph taking was a big thing.
You were lucky if your family owned a camera. A reel of 36
exposures was valuable hence it justified the half hour
preparation & "setting" & the "posing" for each picture.
Therefore, you have at least one family picture where
everyone is holding their breath and standing at attention! |
