Casettes, Floppy Discs, Walkman, Radio transistors, a Black & White TV connected to either an antenna or a big dish. This was the list of gadgets one (apparently from the lower middle class) used to own in the 90s.
I can still recall that moment when a good friend of mine living in my neighbourhood then bought a color TV in the late 90s and got a cable connection. His father used to call all of the children in the colony (including me obviously) and played new movies through his VCR. Sometimes, just for fun, he called us for a cartoon movie, he used to play horror movies, and by turning the lights off, increasing the volume and creating an "environment" which blended perfectly with the movie, we got the worst of a nightmare then but they were also the sweetest of our memories in the making. We even used to throng in front of his TV sets to watch some popular cartoon shows on Cartoon Network.
For gaming, we usually played outside. But some of the boys had this hand held portable gaming console that became an object of show off. Nevertheless those "show-off boys" were kind enough to let us play on those devices but for limited time. I got one only in the mid of the first decade of 2000s when it became dirt cheap due to the increasing demand of modern gaming consoles and decrease in demand of these devices.
For music, we had only a few options. Music shows with fixed timings on Doordarshan and Cassettes were the most common ones. We did not have the luxury of creating a virtual playlist and listening to them just through a single touch. For us, more common and cheaper was the method of recording songs on blank casettes. We then wrote the complete list of songs (recorded in those casette) on the cover paper of the casette. But wait! finding shops that recorded songs was again a gargantuan task. After all this we felt as if we had earned the song and this added to the experience we had on listening the songs.
Everyone had their own set of cassettes. My father being more theistic brought cassettes of sermons of saints etc. I, my sister and my brother had a collection of songs recorded on those cassettes. And wait! we didn't have video cameras then and so my father recorded the voices of my childhood days on a cassette and believe me its way more soothing to listen to such recordings than to see your own childhood videos. And owning these cassettes did not mean that we could play it whenever we liked. We, unlike today, had no earphones. So, playing music was in no way a secret task. When it played, everyone in the home knew that it was playing. And, so our opportunities of listening to songs were limited. We literally earned these opportunities when our parents let us play these songs after a few hours of study.
We even did not have telephones at that time, leave alone smartphones. Only the richer ones could afford to own it and so the world was not so much connected as it is today. This was also one of the reasons why more common among ours were the games like cricket, badminton, carom, ludo etc and not counterstrike, clash of clans, subway surfers, candy crush or temple run. Personally, I came to know about PC games only in 2007 when I first saw some 8 bit games on display during one of the exhibitions in my school (though I knew about Mario but it was the only game that I knew about). It was during the late 90s and early 2000s that game parlours became the new buzz in town where we bought "coins" to play such games like mario and contra. Seriously, we had to go through a lot of scoldings just to get to play in these parlours.
The list is never ending. This world, though, now more advanced and modern will not be the same for us technologically. Any 90s kid would be ready to surrender all his gadgets that he owns now to travel back to the era of 90s where we owned less but were more happy. Ah! Those days... its really difficult to pen down those memories in words.
We even did not have telephones at that time, leave alone smartphones. Only the richer ones could afford to own it and so the world was not so much connected as it is today. This was also one of the reasons why more common among ours were the games like cricket, badminton, carom, ludo etc and not counterstrike, clash of clans, subway surfers, candy crush or temple run. Personally, I came to know about PC games only in 2007 when I first saw some 8 bit games on display during one of the exhibitions in my school (though I knew about Mario but it was the only game that I knew about). It was during the late 90s and early 2000s that game parlours became the new buzz in town where we bought "coins" to play such games like mario and contra. Seriously, we had to go through a lot of scoldings just to get to play in these parlours.
The list is never ending. This world, though, now more advanced and modern will not be the same for us technologically. Any 90s kid would be ready to surrender all his gadgets that he owns now to travel back to the era of 90s where we owned less but were more happy. Ah! Those days... its really difficult to pen down those memories in words.
