A couple of days ago, when me and my mom were on a cleaning drive at home, I accidentally found two large suitcases full of letters. Letters from far away friends, family and millions of them from dad. There were literally hundreds of them. I was awed and this somehow then got followed into very interesting stories about “her times”.

Stories of how there used to be only one monochrome TV set in whole muholla and how everybody used to gather there on Sunday movie nights. How fun was it to rent VCRs cassettes for a day and keep on rewinding back to the favorite scenes just to make the most out of them. Recording your favorite songs on the radio. How everybody in the muholla used to be invited when her mom had cooked something different. Just the mere thought of all this put a strange smile on my face and also forced me to think about “my times”.
If anything our generation is getting close to, it’s virtuality.

Sure some of the above things are being done even today in some or the other formats, but the very essence of them seems to be lost.

The essence which was in the very longing for a letter.

The essence was in the joy when your favorite song unexpectedly played on the radio.

It was in the unison of the joyous exclamations when India won a match.

A time when community mattered and the dictionary bore no word as materialism.

So what led us to master narcissism? I think it won’t be of any harm to blame the technological advances, would it? They sure had their toll on us. And again as someone famous once said,

“To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible”

Until next time

–R