When I Was a Kid

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways under the scorching hot sun barefoot, carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room patshala where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the tea stall where they worked for Tk. 5 an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

I remember promising myself that when I grew up I would never bother kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But... I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! Compared to my childhood, you live in a Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids don't know how good you've got it!

When we were kids we didn't have The Internet if we wanted to know something, we had to either go to the library and look it up ourselves or (even worse) we had to ask our parents!

And there was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter -- with a pen -- and then, we would have to wait for weeks before we got a response. By then world war III could have taken place on the other side of the world and we still would not have known.

There were no MP3s or on-line downloads! If wanted to steal music, you had to go to the tape store and shoplift it yourself!

You want to talk about hardship?

We didn't have fancy cell phones. If you were supposed to meet someone somewhere at a certain time, you had better have been there on time. Changing plans last minute was NOT an option. And if you missed curfew, your parents could not call you and ask where you were. Instead they would worry, which meant that once they knew that you were safe, they would beat you within an inch of your life.

And we didn't have Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was it could be your boss, your mom, a stalker, that special someone, you didn't know!!! You just had to pick it up and take your chances, buddy!

We did not have many options in terms of a social life. It was either drive around in someone's car, or hang around in someone's house. Romances budded and thrived on rooftops and phone conversations, which were usually interrupted by parents because there was no such thing as privacy and only one phone line per household.

And we didn't have any fancy Sony Play stations, video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics. We had to be content with PacMan on your parents' Apple 2. The lucky ones had cooler games like Flight Stimulator.

Watching a movie meant taking permission from your parentsso that they could make sure it was suitable for your viewing. There were no DVD's and Video Connection was our only access to the outside world.

Back then there was no such thing as Star TV. We only had BTV, which at that time only came on after six. And shows like Dallas and Dynasty came on once every week and our parents would watch the show with us and ask us to leave during the R-rated bits.

And there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning... We had to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little brats!

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy You're spoiled. You wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in… 1987!

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