R.I.P.

The decade that’s just passed saw a lot that we took for granted pass into the realm of obsolescence

Discotheques

Until even a few years ago, an evening on town meant going to the disco — Athena or Fire ’N’ Ice in Mumbai; Ghungroo, Dublin, or My Kind of Place in Delhi; Pink Elephant in Kolkata. But these days you’re spoilt for choice — there’s the pub for a quiet drink with friends, the fine-diner for a slightly more formal experience, and the lounge bar if you want music too, with none of the ear-splitting cacophony of the disco.

Walkman/ Discman

Oh, the thrill of buying a new cassette and lots of batteries before a train journey, to make sure the Walkman didn’t run out of power! Audio cassettes have gone and along with it the Walkman. The Discman barely had time to breathe before it was knocked out by the MP3. Now with sleek iPods and sleeker music phones, who wants to lug around a bulky Walkman or Discman?

Quiz shows on TV

No, quizzes aren’t dead — it’s just that television has lost its appetite for them. BQC, Mastermind India, Quiz Time, even Kaun Banega Crorepati, so popular in their time, are gone. This is the age of reality TV, nothing cerebral please! So the only questions viewers are asked to exercise their grey cells these days are priceless ones like... “what percentage of Indians pee in the swimming pool?”

Supermodels

The fashion scene until the ’90s was a one-horse affair — there was the supermodel and then all the rest. Think Madhu Sapre, or Milind Soman, or Mehr Jessia, or Noyonika Chatterjee — faces and bodies that graced the billboards, fronted ad campaigns and walked the ramp from Mumbai to Mamallapuram. Where are they now? Filmstars and cricketers are the new showstoppers, while the supermodels of yore try their luck in Bollywood. Or judge reality shows on TV.

Music channels/ music videos

The Nineties were all about music channels — MTV, Channel V (and their desi wannabes, B4U and ETV) — which did not just introduce us to the best and latest of international chartbusters and artistes, they also set the standards in cool fashion. MTV and Channel V continue to be around, but with FM, MP3 and the iPod to turn to, they’ve lost their monopoly on music. There’s little music these days on the “music” channels, which have figured out that their adolescent target audience is better served through angsty “reality” shows such as Roadies, Dare to Date, Splitsvilla, et al.

With the music channels have gone the music videos — those lovingly-made curtain-raisers to an album that launched the careers of many a musician, not to forget directors like Ken Ghosh and Pradeep Sarkar. The film song killed the music video, without doubt, but there’s also no denying that the latter has greatly influenced the way songs are picturised in Hindi films.

Hardtop suitcases

You wouldn’t want to be caught at an airport today with a hardtop. Luggage fashion has definitely passed the hardtop by, and for good, practical reasons. Shrinking baggage allowances mean you would have to be stupid to waste precious kilograms on the suitcase. Also, the heavy-handed handling at the airport often left you with a cracked suitcase, so the only option left was to junk it.

Scooters

It was squat, it was modest, but the scooter was the chariot of the middle-class Indian householder in the licence raj era, ensuring uncomfortable mobility to hum do-hamare do . Until even a few years ago you could see a few trundling along — hemmed in by all the desi and foreign cars that had flooded the markets. Bajaj’s decision to stop making the vehicle makes business sense, but with the scooter will go an entire way of life.

Snail mail/ Fax

Convenient, efficient and paper-free — there are some very good reasons why email has got the better of snail mail. But with the written letter has gone, too, the romance of the post office, the envelope, the post card, the green glue in the plastic cups which you had to prod with your thumb to seal the envelopes. Why, even stamps are on the way out, replaced by franking machines!

Time was when the only way to duplicate and transmit a document was to sit down and copy it out by hand and then give it to a man on a fast horse. Things changed with the Xerox machine. And with the spread of the fax machine, it became possible to copy and send a page in one fell swoop. Now there are scanners, pdfs and e-mail, and many important documents live their entire lives as digital, not paper artifacts. The fax had its moment; like the landline and dial-up Internet, it was not quite mobile enough to keep up.

CRT Monitors

Slim, slim, slim — laptops, TVs, phones, people or milk, slim is in. Likewise for computer monitors; after all, if the useful part is the screen, why have all that bulk stretching out behind?

ODI cricket

To those of a certain generation, who remember those long-winded debates about how one-day cricket would kill the Test match, there’s a certain poetic justice about the competition ODIs now face from cricket’s Maggi-noodles avatar: T20. But yes, the ODI is on the brink of extinction — television ratings have dipped, advertisers are wary of putting their money on it and even cricketers have sounded its death knell. How did it happen? Simple. While the purists still root for Test cricket, new fans want T20 — so the ODI is left with no takers.

Landlines

Ghar ka phone — the catch-line of Tata Indicom’s latest campaign brings back memories of a time when the landline was the only phone in the household. If it didn’t work, you were literally incommunicado, save for the neighbourhood PCO. Most of us probably have a landline still, but really whoever uses it except for the Internet and because you need MTNL bills as proof of residence? Clearly this is a generation that is, to quote another mobile-ad copy, sold on “walk ’n’ talk”.

Ribbons

One of the unalloyed joys of little-boyhood was running up to a girl and yanking her pigtails; then one ran, chased by angry squeals. Nicest of all were the plaits painstakingly threaded through with colourful ribbons — virtually a badge of girlhood. Now those ribbons are gone, and even very little girls wear their hair short, dress like miniature adults and carry around decorative handbags.

Lazy Summer vacations

Once, a long time ago, summer vacations were a leisurely affair, parcelled out into visits to grandparents, cousins, snoozing around with friends, reading...and getting bored. Today, between the PlayStation and Wii, camps teaching life-skills, art and craft, rock-climbing, and other such indispensable skills, there’s not a moment to breathe. Who has the time any longer to do nothing?

Computer learning centres

Once computer centres were ubiquitous — they were the cradles of a brave new economy, catering to a generation that saw IT as its passport to the good life. But where are they now? NIIT has moved on to “talent development”, APTECH is around but there’s little excitement surrounding it, and TULEC — even a Google search returned nothing useful. Computer skills, I guess, aren’t taught these days; children now are born with them.

Calculators

Once, schoolteachers complained about what the battery calculator was doing to mental math skills. No longer — that battle was quickly lost as education turned into a lucrative business and pupils morphed into consumers. Now even the calculator has lost out in the struggle for survival, its place taken by the calculator functions on cellphones and computers. Curiously, online calculators all mimic the appearance of their endangered real-world brethren.

Air-ticket booklets

Flying used to be a ceremonious affair, right from the moment one entered the booking office. You paid vast quantities of money, then sat and waited while the officious person behind the counter typed your details and printed them into a floppy, slinky little booklet. Two copies — the red carbon copy you could keep, the other one was ripped out at the airport. Now everyone flies; airlines compete desperately for our loyalty; we are our own travel agents, and treat our air-buses with as little regard as the e-ticket printouts stuffed rudely into our back pockets.

Circus

The animal rights-wallahs first raised the banner against circuses, and the multiplexes and malls finished whatever was left of the task. The Indian Circus Federation is down to less than 10 circus troupes today from 50 just decades ago. For a while, circus-owners tried out more adult stuff with bosomy Russian and Uzbek girls, but what were these to children, compared to roaring lions?

Hindutva

The “Hindu” cause just doesn’t enthuse any more. Just look at the BJP, which has gone from being the “party with a difference” to a party of differences. The call to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya finds no traction with voters in this brave new century — it’s all about governance and economic development today. Periodically, the fringe outfits allegedly continue to vandalise pubs and bomb mosques to provoke conflict in the name of religion, but it just gets them more opprobrium, without furthering their cause an inch.

Indi-pop

Indi-pop went too, booted out by remixes, spiced up with raunchy music videos starring “item” girls Rakhi Sawant, Meghna Naidu and Shefali Zariwala. Where are the icons of Indi-pop — Euphoria, Silk Route, Parikrama, Indian Ocean or singers like Falguni Pathak and Daler — today? The live stage, the odd garba, remains the only really big platform for them. Remixes too are, in a way, dead, killed off by an excess of remixes, which led listeners to completely switch off from music channels.

Camera film rolls

The final nail in the coffin was Kodak’s announcement this year that it was stopping production of Kodachrome, the iconic colour film used famously by Steve McCurry to shoot his “Afghan Girl”. This decade also saw the death of many more kinds of film, especially monochrome mediums — and, along with them, the elaborate romance of developing prints inside darkrooms, of poring through negatives and contact sheets. The future of photography is digital, and all those who think otherwise had better stock up on the remaining film-rolls in the stores.

AD Icons

Neighbour’s Envy-Owners’ Pride. Even if you don’t remember the Onida tag-line, you surely haven’t forgotten the Onida Devil? Or the Liril Girl, even though Liril is now too “downmarket” a soap to use? The green-horned devil lasted a full two decades before owning a TV stopped being a matter of pride or envy. As for the “Liril girl”, HUL jettisoned her, wanting new icons of freshness for the aspirational markets. And so passed an era in Indian advertising history.

Ritu Beri

She was the star of the Indian fashion scene in the ’90s, much before the Sabyasachis and the Anamikas took over. And then she went to Paris to train with a master couturier, headed well-known fashion label Scherrer and launched her own prêt line. So why don’t we hear of Ritu Beri these days? To be sure, married and with a daughter, she’s a regular on the society pages, but what of her clothes?