Indian Middle class of the 70’s
Friends,
i would like to share this forward received by me. - The right people will
enjoy reading this, the wrong un’s will laugh uproariously at these facts.
Rgds
Sunny
For those who grew up during the 70s in middle class India, here are some
things that you can identify with – atleast I do! Some never had a thing
and went house to house to enjoy them.
1. Though you may not publicly own to this, at the age of 12-17 years,
you were very proud of your first “Bellbottom” or your first “Maxi” or
your first Apache jeans.
2. Phantom and Mandrake were your only true heroes. The brainy ones
read “Competition Success Review”.
3. Your “Camlin” geometry box and Natraj/Flora pencil was your prized
possession.
4. The only “Holidays” you took were to go to your grandparents’ or
your cousins’ houses.
5. Ice-cream meant only - either an orange stick, a vanilla stick –
ora Choco Bar if you were better off than most.
6. You gave your neighbour’s phone number to others with a ‘c/o’
written against it because you had booked yours only 7 years ago
and were still waiting for your number to come.
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, non-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.
10. Your parents were proud owners of HMT watches. You “earned” yours
after SSC 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 others 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 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 possibly
a mixer.
20. All the gadgets had to be duly covered with covers and sometimes even
with ingenious, custom-fit plastic covers.
21. Movies meant Rajesh Khanna or 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 Boney M.
23. Your hormones went crazy when you heard “Disco Deewane” by Nazia
Hassan and Zoheb Hassan.
24. School teachers, your parents and even your neighbors could whack
you and it was all okay.
25. 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 atleast one family picture where everyone is holding
their breath and standing at attention!
