“Mother serious stop come sharp stop”. Such gems of telegraphic lingo are about to pass into oblivion as the curtain comes down on India’s telegram service on July 15. For 163 years in India the telegram was the short, quick and cheap way to send urgent news. But it’s way over its sell-by date now, bludgeoned into irrelevance by technology such as mobile telephony and the Internet. As we dwell on the demise of the telegram and smile wistfully at the strangely-worded messages it often brought to our door, here’s a look at some of the other things that have vanished from our lives. Thanks to new technology. Or thanks simply to the march of time.
Television antenna
Before cable TV, there was the television antenna — the fulcrum of TV viewing experience for those of us who were alive in the 70s and 80s. It was the Doordarshan-only era, a time when transmission was often patchy, the picture frequently wavy, and terms like “snowing” were used to describe the kinetic fuzziness of the black and white images on your TV set. And each time any of those things happened, the antenna loomed large. One rushed to the roof to give that moody bit of goods a tweak and a twirl in the fond hope that the picture would improve. And so it did sometimes. Miraculously. Some had veritable antenna fingers — like green fingers — and were much in demand. The passing of the TV antenna has not been mourned. But there’s no denying that a lot of hilarious activity has gone out with it.
Typewriter
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Once ubiquitous in every office and at every scribe’s desk, the typewriter is now firmly in the realm of history. But while most of us have shifted joyously to the computer — dammit, its keyboard is so much easier on one’s fingers than the hard, spiky keys of the typewriter, not to speak of the fact that you can do a zillion other things on your comp — some remember the old machine with affection. Tech writer Prasanto K. Roy, who started using his father’s portable Olivetti Lettera 22 while he was in school, became so hooked to typing that he got special permission to write some of his school exams on it. Even after he had switched to a computer some years later, he missed his typewriter for a while. “The sense of accomplishment, of closure, with every keystroke — from key press to the letter getting printed on paper — is simply unmatched by a computer,” says Roy. Many would agree.
Film camera
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This one isn’t totally extinct. But it’s getting there. Some camera makers, such as Nikon, are still manufacturing the odd film camera. And there’s the resolute purist who still shoots with film. But the invasion of digital cameras has all but wiped out cameras that use films for still photography. Kodak too stopped producing its iconic Kodachrome films in 2009. So gone are the days when there was that almost romantic anticipation of waiting to see the result of your photographic effort, waiting for the film roll to be processed and the pictures printed. Somnath Bhattacharya, a hardware professional and a keen photographer, still has his Pentax K1000 film camera. Though he too has defected to a digital camera now, he often longs for the richness of resolution and tone that a film camera brought to the table. “But today, it’s hard to find films, and harder to find good processing labs,” he says.
Audio cassette
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Almost anyone who’s over 35 still has a dusty hoard of music cassettes lying around somewhere. They were lovingly built up collections, but rendered obsolete first by compact discs and now, even more so, by downloadable digital music. The cassette player and the oh-so-cool Walkman have gone down with them too. Do we really miss audio cassettes, especially the poor quality pre-recorded ones? Guess not, but they sure unspool a heck of a lot of youthful memories — of trips to music stores, of gifts given and received, and of hours of painstaking recordings from LPs onto “good quality” Maxell or TDK blank cassettes!
Picture postcard
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Remember the time when anyone who went anywhere on vacation felt a bounden duty to shower friends and relatives with bright-hued picture postcards? And if you didn’t manage to scrawl a few words and send them, why, you brought them back as keepsakes. That tradition has vanished, perhaps because it’s so easy now to click a digital sharp holiday picture and mail it at once. Picture postcards are probably still available at touristy souvenir shops. But when was the last time you sent or received one?
Pen pal
They died a natural death the moment email entered our lives. It used to be cool to have a pen pal — a friend one had never met but communicated with only via handwritten letters. It was a special relationship, nurtured enthusiastically through one’s schooldays — sometimes even later. Today, the germ of the practice continues on social media platforms where you can have hundreds of “friends” whom you’ve never met. But the many Facebook friends or other online buddies scarcely compare with the involvement one had with that exclusive pen pal of yore.
Cake man
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Okay, this is a Calcutta special. In fact, anyone below 40 and a non-Calcuttan can stop reading right now. Some of us who were there then remember the Saldhana cake man who would come calling with his ware of a big black box full of tempting cakes and pastries. The icing on those cream cakes were madly attractive to a child — glistening pale pink, frosty green and white. There were cream horns too and biscuits of various kinds. The cake man’s arrival was greeted with glee and an immediate attack of shameless gluttony. When he disappeared, he took away a bit of one’s childhood along with him.