Change is normally greeted with inertia. But the 1990s children barely had that luxury. They have seen it all and more than that, they have chewed and savoured the saying, “Change is the only constant”. Being one among them, I had a life that so far had been like a train journey where you can’t help but embrace the change in motion, as you see changing terrains, landscapes, populace and so on.

Maybe, children of this generation, the famed Gen Zs, may not believe the things we say that existed 30 years ago. We would write letters in an inland cover and sometimes even in a postcard. I had preserved for a long time the letters I exchanged with a girlfriend of mine. We would wait for days to get a reply. Maybe that taught us some patience! Today, people get frustrated if they don’t get a reply in a few seconds or minutes.

Today’s children may not understand if we said we played all day out in the sun, fields, farms, plantations, and hills. That the games we played were all cheap thrills that sometimes came from dead wood, waste match boxes and cigarette packs, marbles and so on. The variety and the type of games we played was open to the creative extent as the games changed season wise, weather-wise and even day-wise. The marble itself offered us so many varieties of games and the winner would pride himself with a pocket full of clattering marbles.

Moreover, it was all with real friends and real world, nature, its trees and streams. That we plucked and ate fruits directly from the plants and trees and that itself is a travel theme now, to go “cherry-picking”, “self-harvesting”.

We used only a landline telephone and we didn’t know what a mobile was for a great amount of our growing-up years. TV itself was a luxury once and the whole village used to sit and watch a movie on a rented TV and VCR! The travelling theatre troupes were the only kind of concerts we had then. From VCRs, cassettes, Walkman sets, and CDs to the all-in-one phone era, the changes, if we sum up, is astounding and sometimes scary!

After dinner, the family would sit together outside on the verandah and chat as the children played in the moonlight. These family interactions itself is a luxury now, as everyone has a personal companion in hand. The grandparents’ house was the advance booked holiday resort for the entire summer and winter vacations unlike the resorts and home stays people spend a bomb to spend a day or two.

We grew up in a far secure world while our parents were too engaged to make ends meet. We grew up in a far cleaner, greener surroundings. Parents did not worry about which best school in the city to send us to. The government-run schools were all that we had and that sufficed.

We saw the technologies emerge, change, adapt or vanish. From letters to chat or date platforms, from DOS commands to conversational AI such as ChatGPT, we are the examples to show how technology came in like a lovely breeze but sucked in all of us like a tornado. Now, we realise that we are just in the middle and there is another half to expect a hurricane. Does that really excite or bother us? We really don’t know. We barely had leisure to think! We had to adopt and announce our arrival at every new platform! That wasn’t easy at all.

The world is really expected to change faster than it was so far. The human brain once starved for food, but not any more. Knowledge is an open source now and the children of this generation as we see are far more confident and innovative and aren’t ready to accept a mediocre life! But sometimes too much light is blinding and they may need us to guide them in the right light. And for that we still need to keep pace with the changing technologies and be abreast and upbeat! Cheers to those 1990s and cheers to whatever that future holds for.

ashokbbalakrishna@gmail.com

Published - August 16, 2026 12:15 am IST