So here I am sitting at the cusp of another year

Nostalgia and New Year blues

So hereu00a0I am sitting at the cusp of another year. In a new cafe down the road from my house that wasn't there a month ago. (The cafe, that is, not my house.)

As I look back over the decade, there's so much one takes for granted today, that didn't even exist 10 years ago. As Sushmita turned from fresh-faced deb to single mother to kept woman to ageing starlet to has-been ex-actress, so many fads have ebbed and waned and life has altered itself.

Back in 2000, life was so much less networked. Merely the affluent had mobile phones and the rest had notebooks where we entered (sorry handwrote) friends' landline numbers. Calling a mobile phone was an invasion of privacy and the privilege was reserved only one's closest friends and business associates. Today nobody has anybody's landline numbers, except if you are someone's closest friend.

In those days, if you wanted to meet a pal, well you simply met them over coffee or a movie or a glass of draught. These days, you not only meet friends over Facebook and Twitter and Orkut, you also have to scrap them, tag them, throw baby elephants at them, tweet them, hug them, pinch them, poke them and like their status messages. When exactly does one get to actually meet them and go out with them?

In 2000, people who read, read a book. And those who didn't, well, merely didn't. The smell of fresh-printed paper or the aroma of second-hand aged yellowing novels brought with them their own romance, irrespective of whichever genre you were reading.u00a0 But today it's not really about which bookstore one haunts. Today, one doesn't browse, one Kindles.

Where a grotesque chrome and glass mall stands today, was a jacaranda tree and an institution called the Victoria Hotel. Nothing you said would make the waiters hurry up. But then in those days, nobody wanted to hurry things up. You unwound, you had a beer and then you went home. Now you run into a pub, you order ten drinks so you actually get something to drink before the cops storm in, and then you race home before the traffic cops catch you.u00a0

In those days, Koramangala was far away and Nagharbhavi was - was it there at all? You could drive down MG Road in 10 minutes, from end to end. Well, that's ancient history now - and I'm so sure the way thing are going that in 2020, taking an hour down MG Road will probably seem like a pipe dream.

The point is, life has changed. Tech is supposed to make our lives simpler and easier. But really, wasn't it better in 2000?