I can recall the image of my father going behind the bush and coming back buttoning his fly. The other image I have is that you arre getting late, and find that the bottom buttons of the fly of your pair of trousers is missing or broken, thanks to the zeal of the family washerman. Well, that's a thing of the past. So also the institution of family washerman who came once or maximum twice in the fortnight. Now you have the washing machine, detergent and the family dhobi who used to beat your clothes to bring dirt and grime into submission, and is now the person who presses your clothes washed at home.
2. LPG
I have fond memory of my grandmother washing and then entering the kitchen in a silk sari. Chopped wood and later cole was used in the earthen stove (chulha). It was smoky in the beginning till the fire was properly caught by the fuel. Now you have the gas stove. Microwave will take some more time to enter larger number of houses, maybe another decade. Gone are the days of smoke. I remember the maharaj in our hostel mess (he was invariably a brahman) who cooked on wood and that sometimes we sat by his side in the kitchen to have our lunch or dinner instead of going to the regular dining hall. The capacity was only 1 or 2.
3. Pressure Cooker
Remember the days when every home had a specialy heavy vessel for cooking dal? And that dal had to be put on the chulha much earlier than other items like rice and vegetables. I remember that once I went to one of my maternal uncle's village without prior intimation (atithi in the real sense), and he decided to have mutton. I was hungry and the dinner could be served only after 10 pm. In the meantime he went somewhere had 2-3 quick drinks leaving me behind, making me hungrier and yes, envious. I was in my twenties then. These two gadgets made the biggest difference in the daily routine of a housewife.
4. Photocopier
During my early years in service, I was posted to Mandla as Collector in a leave vacancy for a few months. Those days the first thing you did on landing in the district was the search for the District Gazeteer. This was a book written by an English collector. That was much before the days of Mayawati. The collector of a district got a reasonable tenure of a few years, and during this period he became, if not fully then reasonably, well acquainted with the district, its terrain, people and shikaar both avian and otherwise. Anyway there was a single copy of the book available, the pages had turned yellow and brittle, the binding had become loose. From all appearances, the book had limited life. I thought that I had to preserve it somehow. The only way out was to type the entire book, which I got done in about 2 weeks, with the help of 2-3 typists. Those were the days before the advent of the photocopier. Remember the days when the maximum number of copies a typewriter could take out was 6 and that also when thin rice paper and new carbons were used the keys had to be pressed hard. Come to think of it, the thin rice paper which was used in office correspondence then is not used anymore.
5. Word Processor
My guess is that eighty percent of desktop PCs in the country today are used for wordprocessing work only. In Sussex when I was typing out my dissertation written in long hand with pencil, I remember the caution I had to use to see that the page does not contain so many mistakes that it had to be retyped. Now on the computer you can merrily make as many mistakes that you can: they can always be corrected without losing your first draft altogether. And imagine the difference it has made in the amount of lesser work that your PA has to do.
6. Air Conditioner
When I was a child in a small town in UP - India, in the summer everybody went to the rooftop in the night for sleeping. Some had charpoys, some took the cotton mattresses, and some just a durrie and pillow. And that was godsent opportunity for thieves who merrily entered the house to take away things and utensils of everyday use when the entire household was dreaming away on the roof. I remember one such theft in our house, and another time when a thief was running away from some more alert household and his body was glistening with oil- so that catching him was a slippery affair. Then came the coolers for dry summer heat, and airconditioners foe the more prosperous, making it possible for people to sleep in the room and thus plugging the age-old avenue for the petty thief. As a school student I had gone once to the High Court at Allahabad in summer, and the image I have is the number of khus tattis with a battalion of watermen to sprinkle water to keep them wet. I also remember reading an article long ago on JRD Tata where it was mentioned that he hops from an airconditioned car to an airconditioned office and I remember I was suitably impressed.
7. Cable Television
Remember the days when India had only one Doordarshan channel, and it was thought not prudent to go visiting your friends on Sunday evening when Doordarshan telecast a movie? Or the days when the roads were deserted in the time when the serials Ramamyan and Mahabharat were telecast? Well, now you have 100+ channels and at any time of the day you have at least half a dozen movies running, and more during the weekends. Apropos of nothing, I have this pet theory that the serials Ramayan and Mahabharat had a significant role to play in the rise of BJP.
8. Telecom Revolution
It was in early seventies that I was posted to Jashpurnagar, a sleepy town of 10,000 population in the then Madhya Pradesh (now Chhattisgarh). There was manual telephone and the line so fragile that you could almost never talk with your seniors in the district headquarters which was 213 km away. I was engaged to my wife during my 2-year tenure there and I could talk to her on telephone only when I went to the district headquarters. Compare this with today when in Mumbai you have more mobile connection than land lines, and my brother-in-law has surrendered the land line at his residence as for his small family of two, they can do more cheaply with 2 mobiles. Gone is the waiting list for telephone connection in the days of monopoly of government sector. And starting from Gwalior to Mumbai on the Punjab Mail, I can talk during every halt of the train. Once I had an owner/CEO of a manufacturing unit travelling in the same compartment who used to get a call at every halt from his office. Poor 2 I/C of his must have kept 'Trains at a Glance' (the Bradshaw of Indian Railways) in front of him during the entire run of the train.
9. The Chip
From computer to space ship, from washing machine to microwave oven and from wrist watches to cell phones this tiny rectanguar marvel is ubiquitous now, or in other words it is the heart of all these 'matters'. I am seeing the film cameras losing out to digital cameras and PCs to laptops the price of which are coming down almost to the former's level.
10. And Lastly...
Death of the Post card. In other words, changed mode of correspondence. There are any number of old Hindi film songs on the dakia (postman) and the chitthi (hand written letter) he brought. I still remember the pleasure with which the inland letter was received when it was first introduced in the country. Now at least in urban India of 20% population, that is gone. Now we have courier service and the use of fax or email replacing official and business correspondence. Add to it the on-line ordering and railway and airline booking on the net.
