Blast From the Past

TO is studying psychology in high school. I use the word studying very lightly. The mere thought of studying and revising before exams acts better than a sedative ever could. And while he is reportedly awake, alert and participating in class; he does a very thorough impression of someone suffering from amnesia whenever he’s asked to share anything that he’s learnt. But been there and done that so he’s given a pass…for the millionth time.

Anyhoo, being the self-proclaimed psychology expert at home, I was quickly checking in with him about the terms, theories etc and we touched upon the topic of associative memory and cues and I guess that would have jogged quite a few associations in my own mind as well.

This morning during the school drop-off, I saw the letters ASL on the bumper of a car I was behind and it was like being pulled through a portkey into the 2000s!

For those who no longer chat on chat platforms (?) like MIRC and ICQ (possibly because they’ve gone the way of the dodo), ASL was the way you got did your intro while chatting with someone for the first time. And for this unworldly college girl from the tier-2 and 3 cities of India, it was a whole new dimension to explore. One of the college besties helped me set up my first email id because till then I didn’t know something like that existed. 1998 was the year of the awakening in so many ways.

My interactions with computers in any shape and form had ended with the tiny-screened Macs which were in my elementary school classrooms. Since learning via fun was a go-to way to teach concepts, Carmen San Diego and the Oregon Trail were games we were encouraged to play. Not sure how much we learnt but they definitely built sturdier desktops back in the day is all I’ll say about that.

In high school, we had a class which passed for learning computers but sadly, the teacher’s inability to make things fun or even tell us how the program/language would be useful, made eyes glaze over every single time and I vaguely remember it was something called Lotus and we were being taught something that may or may not have been the precursor to MS Excel. The information lies in the Bermuda Triangle that houses many of my memories.

Fast forward to the last 90s and early 2000s and suddenly there was a world of relatively higher-speed internet, cyber cafes that did the job that regency ballrooms did to enable introduction and mingling amongst the sexes. So seeing ASL meant that you were to state your age, sex and location and take it from there. And so we did. Sometimes with hilarious results and other times with a bit of a learning that privacy and discretion were still lessons needed to be learnt.

All in all, it’s been a good start to the day…some nostalgia intermixed with the present and some thoughts for the future. Or, it might have something to do with a stronger than usual coffee I made myself today…c’est la vie!