A blast from the past..

My three nephews have been real upset and restless for the last couple of days, the reason being that their PS2 is busted and the repairman has not been able to repair and deliver, at the speed they were expecting.

I always encourage them to spend their time collectively in different activities, other than PS2 and the internet, so the conversation gets initiated by my eldest son when he asks me how I spent my summer holidays as an eleven year old. Honestly speaking the question did put a smile on my face, because I remembered that we never had much in the sense of electronic/electrical gadgets, but we did have an excellent time.

Some of things we did:

We would find an old bicycle rim, which we would roll about using a wooden stick.
We would play hoops with a bicycle tire, basically fling it and make sure it landed in/over the street lamp.
We would take an empty bottle of mineral water (Gulfa, I remember) and wedge it between the back tire and the bicycle frame, producing a motor cycle sound effect (brm-brm-brm-brm).
Ramadan was the best time, we would burn steel wool and run like crazy creating lines of sparks and flares in the dark, and play hide and seek with the kids from the fareej.

I continued enlightening my kids that in those days the streets were empty by 9pm, people went to bed by 10pm. They were surprised !!! But what really got them is when I mentioned two things:

The fact that cars did not have air-conditioning, and that windows were manually operated.
The first mobile phone was similar to a suitcase (Ghazal), and the first handheld mobile weighed around 1kg.

That made me wonder that in the years to come, all those gadgets and technology that we utilize today which we consider as world-class achievements, will be looked upon by our grand-children as primitive.

I guess that’s the way it is…
13/8/2007 Capt. Arab