How Was Life When You Were Growing Up?

My daughter was going to school after a small gap. Her take was these days in school there is only revision and she will do more studies sitting at home. We bought that argument with a pinch of salt. So the day came along when she finally made up her mind to make it to school. We woke her up just to make sure that she did not change her mind. After some time she came to me and said, ” The water is all muddy”. I told her to take out the water from the storage bucket and use it. We have never faced a water shortage until now. I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s speech, “This is water”. In his speech, he mentioned the story of two young fishes asking each other, ” What the hell is water”? The point of the story is the most important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Our community WhatsApp group became more than active with some people questioning the non-availability of this resource which occupies 2/3rd of earth. The committee had to put its foot down and make people aware and become accountable for the usage of water on a day-to-day basis. In the last week, we have embraced a different lifestyle where we treat water with so much dignity. We make sure that we shower before the tap dries up and also make sure that when we use it we are judicious. My wife particularly had gone through this phase when she was in Delhi. I partially had this experience for some time when I was staying in Mumbai. I was reminded of those experiences when we used to store water in large buckets which prompted me one evening to go to the nearby City Supermarket and order a couple of them. For my daughter, this was the first time she was brushing her teeth without running water. This was a watershed moment for her.

In one of those evening dinner-time conversations she asked us this interesting question, ” How was your life back in those days when you were growing up?” That was an insightful question and it made me look back at things that we have done but are not true or relevant anymore. Here are 6 things that I unpacked for her:

1. I mentioned one of those visits to my village I had the opportunity to go to a movie. There used to be 4 intervals as the film reels had to be changed multiple times. The only options for food were tea/ coffee and a single snack. I am not sure if ice cream was also made available if it was an upscale theatre.
2. I shared my memories of traveling on the bus and how the conductor used to take out different colors of the ticket which he will take out from his ticket box after making his thumb in contact with the tongue. Different colors of tickets signified different tariff rates.
3. Coming to Television and with one channel which used to start at 6 AM and finish by 11 pm, this was a big surprise for her. I used to wonder about the Krishi Darshan program and used to wait for that program to finish. The only attractions those days were the weekend cinema, Chitrahaar on Wednesday and Friday, and finally Star Trek on Sundays. Our tube viewing was around these many programs.
4. Another interesting factor that I mentioned was that relatives used to come over without calling or checking if we were at home because most of the time we were either at school or at home. There were no malls or there was no practice of going out and eating. She was tearing her hair by now.
5. There were frequent visits to temples, relatives, and once in a blue moon to the seaside where we would wash our feet and taste some salty water and munch salted peanuts which were filled in nicely in that paper cone. If we are lucky a masala dosa from India Coffee House or Arul Jyothi.
6. Let us now get to load shedding. That was the time when we as a family used to sit around in our sofas and talk a lot. My grandfather and mother would reel out old anecdotes and my mother would check out on my exam schedules and my preparation for the same. It was a time nonetheless we felt that there was nothing else to do and there was everything to talk about.

I am happy that she asked this question which made me think and bring it up in the form of a blog. I am happy with one maxim of my life, ” You are what you write down“. This experience of looking back and sharing with my daughter was a way to reconcile to reality and become ” well adjusted“. It was a revision for me and this unpacking made me appreciate the strand of life.