Forgotten Little Old Things-1

Remember typewriters? If you're less than fifteen years old, you're probably not even sure about what typewriters look like. But people didn't always have laptops and iPads. There was a time when if you wanted to have a 'typed' document, you had to use a typewriter. Typing on a typewriter took considerably more time than on laptops, was cumbersome, didn't give a variety of fonts and even getting used to or even training. But it served the purpose. But now you rarely even see them anymore. It's like old things go away and new things come about, and nobody even pays attention to the change. Thinking about this made me think about a lot of things that were indispensable less than twenty years ago, but are pretty much forgotten about now. So, I started taking photographs of such things as a way of remembering them. Who knows? By the time I'm thirty, these things may not even be around to take pictures of.

Following are some photographs from my collection. All the pictures were taken by me and are not downloaded from any website. I really had to look for some of these things, because they are just so hard to find these days. I'll upload more pictures when I have more.

 
The Letterbox

Remember when we wrote on postcards to tell our grandparents we're fine? And then we'd walk to the closest letterbox and put our letter through the slot. And now? Letterboxes like these can still be seen, but nobody ever pays any attention to them because letter-writing is now a lost art (hey, even emails are losing out to Facebook, so what do you expect?) When I was a kid, I'd beg for permission to put the letter through the slot, kind of like a lot of kids beg for permission to push elevator buttons. It seemed like such a big deal at the time. I always got confused about the what the colors of the boxes stood for. These pictures were taken in front of Jadavpur Police Station (near Jadavpur University, Kolkata which I attend). Look at the picture on the right. The writing says 'Kolkata 700032, For All Letters In Kolkata City'. Can you imagine that? There was a time not too long ago when people used to write letters to send messages to people living within their own cities!

The picture below shows the four different colors of letterboxes in India:

(source: http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/India/West/Rajasthan/Jaipur/photo173426.htm)

Manually Pulled Rickshaws and Ambassadors

I took this picture in Maniktala, Kolkata. Manually pulled rickshaws are slowly disappearing from the city, despite being extensively common in the past. Some people support this decision as these rickshaws put a lot of strain on the puller's body and may cause lung problems to them. It's time to start documenting these rickshaws as they may soon disappear altogether.

The Ambassador (see the white car in background) is a car we've all seen. They're bulky, bulbous and exude an old world charm that is uniquely Indian despite the British origin of the car. I mean, when yopu think about Indian politics, you have to think about the Ambassador because it's the car in which all politicians drive around in. They're most common in and around Kolkata as they are manufactured in Uttarpara. This is one car that just won't die because it's been around since the 50s, but they are becoming a rarer sight day by day. In fact, Sale of Ambassador taxis had been banned since April 1, 2011. In an age where sleekness, noiseless interiors and dark colors are the 'in' things, Ambassadors are losing out to competition and I wonder if we're saying goodbye to the big white car that's fondly called 'The King of Indian Roads'.

The Black-and-White TV

We had a black-and-white TV when I was a kid. It was tiny and needed to be 'tuned' by rotating knobs placed just under the screen. There was no remote and since I was the youngest, I was often asked to get up and change the channel/ turn the volume up or down. We only got two channels- DD1 and DD2. Black-and-white TVs are symbolic of entertainment in the later half of the last century. It is extremely hard to find one today! That's why I was so surprised when I came across one in a small tea shop in Jadavpur, Kolkata. The owner was kind enough to let me take pictures (even though I ordered nothing and don't even drink tea). He even posed while 'tuning' the TV and said he only uses this TV to watch cricket matches and has a color TV at home.

Records

Okay, so these are a bit before our time and that's exactly why they're such a novelty. I took this picture of my grandfather's record collection. There's just one song on each record. My grandfather's house even has a gramophone we could play these records on, be we lost the pin. See, one of the problems with keeping old things is that it's very hard to get parts for them, so if you lose or damage just one part, the whole device becomes useless.

Compare these records to the mp3 files we download to our phones and computers these days. We can have thousands of songs stored in a tiny chip. To think there was a time when you could have just one song on one record that was played on a huge gramophone!

There are still some things that I want to take pictures of, so I'll be back with a part 2 for this post. Meanwhile, if you have any interesting forgotten things to talk about, tell me about them in the comments.