We have allowed our daily lives to be suffocated with so many accretions over the last three or four decades:
In 1943, when I was an eight-year old, growing up in the colonial shadows of the second world war, I did not know the taste of canned and bottled fizzy drinks. Or squash. If it was the lime or orange season the fruit would be squeezed, sugar added and it was delicious. Often, with sugar rationing during the war years, Ammamma (my father's sister, who ran the household) would add vellam, a raw jaggery, which came in dark brown lumps. We had no fridge, indeed in my father's house there was never a fridge. I offered to buy him one in the late eighties, during a brief bout of imagined wealth, but he wisely refused, saying he didn't want another addition to the list of necessities of his life.
Now, my family buy Coke and Pepsi in numbers and our fridge has to make ice cubes to augment the luxury. Interestingly, I still can't drink very cold drinks, never having had the practice in my childhood. Netflix is of course my family's best indulgence on Covid nights. I try to remember what I did at their age in India, beside reading to pass the time.
I remember we had a brown-and-black bakelite Philipps radio, the size of a small microwave oven. Radio, Ceylon came on at four in the evening and Binaca Geethmala, (a stream of songs sponsored by Binaca toothpaste) could keep me occupied for hours. Until the radio went up in smoke one day; it self-destroyed. Never found out why. The radio was not replaced, until the seventies when I went home from England one time carrying a transistor radio as a gift for my father. That was the size of a toaster.
Now, in my home, there are four TVs, two sound systems and a radio by each bed. With three wage earners in the house, we just buy whatever we think we need. Emphasis on the word think.
As to clothes, the less said, the better. We are running out of storage space.
And the three adults in our house own a car each though we tend to travel to the same places. My father bought his first car in 1949; a light blue Standard Eight, with a small window on the roof, which never became rain-proof. It was the runaround for the whole neighbourhood. I continued to walk the two miles to school and back. Eventually father sold the car because he found he couldn't afford all the trips he financed for everyone on our road.
Looking back, as people my age spend time doing, nothing was imported in our little town. Fish came, practically gasping for air, straight from the sea and the river. The fisherman trotted down the road, eager to sell the fish before it got spoiled. Similarly the lamb and beef were butchered right in front of the customers, in the market stall.
All the vegetables were grown locally. The vegetable vendor would offer aubergine, bittergourd, drumsticks, pumpkins... Cabbage and French beans were not grown in our town and were considered expensive English vegetables. Ditto tomatoes, capsicum and cauliflower. The woman who sold veg to us generally had several types of fresh spinach and long beans, which she grew in her back garden.
I have to think really hard to picture anything that came from outside our little town. Saris arrived from other parts of India and pretty textiles too.
All this has changed now. India is fully globalised. The lemmings all over the world are blindly walking towards dependence on far-off lands, waste, and in the final reckoning, destruction of our long-suffering planet.
All we need now is something from somewhere else that can do our thinking for us. We have made a start with Google Searches.
In 1943, when I was an eight-year old, growing up in the colonial shadows of the second world war, I did not know the taste of canned and bottled fizzy drinks. Or squash. If it was the lime or orange season the fruit would be squeezed, sugar added and it was delicious. Often, with sugar rationing during the war years, Ammamma (my father's sister, who ran the household) would add vellam, a raw jaggery, which came in dark brown lumps. We had no fridge, indeed in my father's house there was never a fridge. I offered to buy him one in the late eighties, during a brief bout of imagined wealth, but he wisely refused, saying he didn't want another addition to the list of necessities of his life.
Now, my family buy Coke and Pepsi in numbers and our fridge has to make ice cubes to augment the luxury. Interestingly, I still can't drink very cold drinks, never having had the practice in my childhood. Netflix is of course my family's best indulgence on Covid nights. I try to remember what I did at their age in India, beside reading to pass the time.
I remember we had a brown-and-black bakelite Philipps radio, the size of a small microwave oven. Radio, Ceylon came on at four in the evening and Binaca Geethmala, (a stream of songs sponsored by Binaca toothpaste) could keep me occupied for hours. Until the radio went up in smoke one day; it self-destroyed. Never found out why. The radio was not replaced, until the seventies when I went home from England one time carrying a transistor radio as a gift for my father. That was the size of a toaster.
Now, in my home, there are four TVs, two sound systems and a radio by each bed. With three wage earners in the house, we just buy whatever we think we need. Emphasis on the word think.
As to clothes, the less said, the better. We are running out of storage space.
And the three adults in our house own a car each though we tend to travel to the same places. My father bought his first car in 1949; a light blue Standard Eight, with a small window on the roof, which never became rain-proof. It was the runaround for the whole neighbourhood. I continued to walk the two miles to school and back. Eventually father sold the car because he found he couldn't afford all the trips he financed for everyone on our road.
Looking back, as people my age spend time doing, nothing was imported in our little town. Fish came, practically gasping for air, straight from the sea and the river. The fisherman trotted down the road, eager to sell the fish before it got spoiled. Similarly the lamb and beef were butchered right in front of the customers, in the market stall.
All the vegetables were grown locally. The vegetable vendor would offer aubergine, bittergourd, drumsticks, pumpkins... Cabbage and French beans were not grown in our town and were considered expensive English vegetables. Ditto tomatoes, capsicum and cauliflower. The woman who sold veg to us generally had several types of fresh spinach and long beans, which she grew in her back garden.
I have to think really hard to picture anything that came from outside our little town. Saris arrived from other parts of India and pretty textiles too.
All this has changed now. India is fully globalised. The lemmings all over the world are blindly walking towards dependence on far-off lands, waste, and in the final reckoning, destruction of our long-suffering planet.
All we need now is something from somewhere else that can do our thinking for us. We have made a start with Google Searches.
