The lost era

Looking at old pictures refreshed my memories of the ‘90s.

It sounds highly clichéd when we hear someone say that the digital age has revolutionized our lives. But this rather commonplace fact struck me, when I was going through an assortment of old family photo albums from the 90s. 

“You were that kid! Look at you,” shrieked my sister Sawera in disbelief, as she pointed to a picture of a girl with a bald head and mischievous eyes, smiling at the camera. She would not let me hear the end of the fact that my parents would get my head shaved till the age of ten.

We were sorting old photo albums—not Facebook ones, but actually a tangible collection of family pictures. And as I stared at smiling faces from yesteryears, a wave of nostalgia swept over me and I couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed by the faded, dog-eared photographs, which captured the essence of life in the 1990s.

While examining other older photos, I shifted my focus from the subject of the picture to the background. I saw VHS tapes crammed inside the shelves in the backdrop. The arrangement of the furniture in the backdrop captured the distinctiveness and style of the decade I was born in — the lost era of Ainak wala jinn, Michael Jackson’s moonwalk and high-waisted pants.

But fast forward to 2012, digital pictures have replaced printed pictures, which are solely taken for the purpose of posting on Facebook and ostentatiously informing others of the excitement and happiness in our lives. Gone are the days when pictures were taken for the simple purpose of documenting memories for reminiscing later.

For someone like me, who was born during the 1990s, advancement in technology and lifestyles in the new millennium has been a bit too rapid. However, it has still not overshadowed the memories of the bygone age.

I still vividly remember carrying plastic lunch boxes to school and posing for analogue cameras. It seems like yesterday when I would endlessly chew on Ding Dong gum, while watching Popeye the Sailor and Pink Panther on PTV.

While today’s kids are hooked on to their play stations, I grew up in a time when games were simpler and more physically challenging. Surely acing a stage of angry birds does not give one the kind of adrenaline rush that playing hide and seek, musical chairs and baraf pani does.

With the flood of technological applications and gadgets invading our lives — Facebook, PS3, Iphones and Ipads—simpler ways of having fun are now history. Call me cynical, but I feel that the ‘90s were a more tranquil period. There were no flood of emails, Facebook updates and constant Tweets to distract us from connecting meaningfully with friends and family in real life. Listen to a song from the ‘90s and you will know what I mean; it is bound to revive pleasant memories of a trouble-free time.

But much to my dismay, I know that I am also part of the digital revolution. I, too, am lost in the world of virtual networks and visuals. While sifting, through scores of old photos, I just felt a tad guilty for not having printed any of my recent photographs which have been taken, predictably so, by a digital camera.

My thoughts were interrupted when my sister excitedly declared that she will be scanning our best childhood pictures and putting them up on Facebook. I immediately raised an eyebrow at her idea, but still I couldn’t help feeling, quite sheepishly so, excited about the number of Facebook ‘likes’ it would get.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 10^th, 2012.