Crossover Generation

This is an effort to capture changes during 80s and 90s. I call our generation as crossover generation because I think it has seen most changes due to the IT boom in these two decades. I graduated in Elect. Engg. from  Osmania University, Hyderabad India in 1984. After working for about five years in Hyderabad (then APSEB), I migrated to Detroit, US in pursuit of greener currencies.

We are typically reaching 40s, have 11 year olds and are deep into the jungles of married lives. We are just hearing rumblings of “uncle” now and then from kids, which I quickly ignore obviously. I don’t see myself aging (It’s like I am watching an aging train full of passengers go by, and I am not traveling in it). Enough of digressing, I am talking about some things which were real precious in 70s/80s are now commodities today.

Let me start with Hyderabad and things that were cool back then.

Luna/TVS 50/RajDhoot were in-things. Upgrade for Luna had springs for the rear seat and you can imagine the horse’s power in 50cc. The fuel pipe would almost fill the fuel tank. Does anybody remember the moped “Suwega” ? may be the name (Su-Wega) stood for good speed .. Colorful Chetaks with it's razor sharp edges were accessible to only newly-weds or someone who had access to foreign currency. Today you can trade your old car for a brand new two-wheeler. It has the power of all of the traded 4 wheels.

Maheshwari theatre was just inaugurated and biggest attraction was escalator. The escalator was meant for the highest class - one way only for the last few steps. After the show one has to walk down the regular steps like a pauper. Look at what happens today in Somajiguda’s Life Style mall, you hardly find stairs anywhere

Telephone was a rare commodity. The telephone number to PP number ratio (I don’t know what it stands) was running at 1:10 (could easily be one of the economic indexes). The whole apartment floor would give a number as PP number (neighbor’s number).
Let me digress, my friend’s dad was extremely generous to allow everyone in the street have his number as the PP number. One day it was raining heavily, there was no electricity and someone couple of streets away got a call. His dad finally convinced him to take an umbrella and asked him to inform the called person. My friend reluctantly (almost cursing his Dad and PP guy) walked to his house in darkness. After several knocks at the door, the PP guy opened the door, looked at the sky and said “can you ask him to call me tomorrow”. Nowadays people are talking on cell phones (while driving two-wheelers).

W.r.t IT developments back in early 80s, we saw glimpses of stacks of punched cards being carried by serious programmers in colleges. Keyboard/terminal was a rare sight.
In APSEB It was highly a hierarchical structure in computers. Only senior programmers would touch the keyboards, rest of us were asked to debug by marking COBOL code on print-outs and handover to senior programmers. They would enter the code and tell us next day whether the code ran OK. It was like performing archana in a temple handing over coconuts/flowers and waiting for prasadam back from chief archakas. In fact compute center was like a temple with all chappals near the door.

Most IT changes started in 1996 when Redwood Shores released Oracle
Version 7 & Forms 4. Thanks to stored procedures, event triggers and LOVs that magically brought bread onto the tables of many families here and abroad.

For pre-92 US families (F1 breeds) like ours, the biggest change was having family members / friends around. Social life is richer nowadays unlike early 90s. We don’t have to pleadingly look for potential desi friends in malls. I still have long distance bills (to India) charging $2.50 for the first minute and $1.80 for the rest. They used to compete head-on with the apartment rents. It was earth shattering when MCI announced $1.32 / minute during weekends. Prices have been falling ever since. Calling cards are taking back us into our living rooms back home. The only negative aspect of calling card is by the time you enter the toll-free and pin numbers, you tend to forget the name of the person you want to talk to. I just called Hyderabad @ 9c / min and bored the heck of my family members .. money does many things .. The first browser (Mozilla) I have seen was in 1994. Prior to that I was addicted to soc.culture.indian newsgroup following all the threads and infighting among newsgroup contributors. Slowly Mozilla morphed into rich browser, search engines, travel reservations, e-commerce, online trading, venture capitals, and incubators. Hundreds of start-ups slowly disappeared in the IPO bubble burst resulting in financial misfortunes to lot of our folks. Look at 5 years charts of any big tech company, they all look like a Grand Canyon mountain range that slowly peak and suddenly drop into a valley.

I don’t know what is in store for future, outsourcing & education. With most US universities having tie-ups in India, we will have the same experience as our parents did, see off kids pursuing higher studies at Detroit airport (instead of  Hyderabad). With so many IT outsourcing initiatives, they may not come back at all. The generation that has initiated US migration (IT wise) might get stranded in US.