Those were the days!!

 

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Those were the Days, my friend !

The 70's  n 80's reloaded...

Your "Camlin" geometry box withNatraj/Flora pencil was your prized possession.

The only "Holidays" you took were to go to your grandparents' or your cousins' house .. generally somewhere within the country !

Ice-cream meant only - either an orange stick, a vanilla stick – or a Choco Bar if you were better off than most.

You gave your neighbour’s phone number to others with a ‘c/o’ written against it because you had booked yours only SEVEN years ago and were still waiting for your number to come.

Your parents were proud owners of HMT watches. You "earned" yours after the dreaded SSC exams.

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 !

You at least once heard "Hawa Mahal" on the radio. Or seen "Hum Log" on TV.

If you had a TV, it was normal to expect the neighborhood to gather around to watch the Chitrahaar or Ramayan 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.

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 or "EC" TVs. That confused the hell out of you ...

Black White TVs weren't so bad after all because cricket was played in whites.

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 Sultan and Sarita Sethi also did'nt smile in Doordarshan News during the days of mourning ...

You knew that "Indira Gandhi" was somebody really powerful and terribly important. And that's all you needed to know.

The only "Gadgets" in the house were the TV, the Fridge and possibly a mixie.

All the gadgets had to be duly covered with a crochet covers and sometimes even with ingenious, custom-fit plastic covers.

Movies meant Rajesh Khanna or Amitabh Bachchan. Before the start of the movie you always had to watch the obligatory black & white " Indian Newsreel ".

Your hormones went crazy when you heard "Disco Deewane" by Naziya Hassan and Zoheb Hassan.

School teachers, your parents and even your neighbours could whack you and it was all okay.

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 it took with everybody holding their breath and standing at attention!

During Diwali / Id celebaration it was family clothes tailored from your favourite tailor down the road with all shirt pant and and sister's clothes with same cloth design .. it was quite common...

We walked to school or took a bus ( but,it was also FUN to bike down ! ) ... the ones who got dropped by car were always the RICH ones.

Our outdoor games were gully danda, marbles, stick in the mud, langdi, lagoori , abba dubhi , Dog and the bone, chupa chupi .... and don't forget the "FOUR CORNERS" in the school corridors during every Interval / Break.

Going out to eat in a restaurant was an occasion maybe once or twice in a year.

Mostly we managed with one pair of shoes for the whole year at school, our elder brother/sisters clothes , books were passed to us for school...

" Duckback " raincoats were premium what we could get starting the school in rainy season every year...

Life was fine, and we could happily survive without Mobile Phones, Internet, e-Mail and Whats App. The air was pure, the Grass was green, the sky was Blue, and the word 'pollution' was just another dirty word in the dictionary.