1964 ... and the world we have lost

Our sense of nostalgia often makes us travel back to the past, to what was and what will not be again. As we step into the year 2024, those of us who were in school in 1964 and sixty years on are well into our seventies or proceeding speedily to that age are driven by curiosity to travel back to a time when the world was different.
Technology was in its infancy, from the point of view of those who inhabit South Asia. Around the world, e-mail was yet to be and Facebook and Twitter (now X) were not part of the imagination. Nothing called a mobile phone or Ipad was there. We had little idea that a day would come when we would not need to make our way to cinema houses to watch movies. That we could watch movies at home, that there would be something called Netflix, did not occur to us.
We had nothing called the internet. Long distance telephone calls could only be made through a system known as trunk calls. There was the telegram, which often was a ruse for fathers to ask their sons serving away from home to 'come sharp, mother ill'. It was discovered that the mother was fine, that the family had planned that summons to have the son get married.
In 1964, we spoke in school of the competition for space, wondering if man could at all reach the moon. There were the spots, Timbuktu for instance, in geography we were becoming acquainted with, principally by reading the newspapers. We learnt such new phrases as 'coup d'etat', 'overthrow' and 'ouster' when news of coups in Africa and other parts of the globe appeared in the media. There was yet no television in our part of the world and all we had at hand to keep in touch with world events was the radio.
Not many among us possessed the radio, of course, or what subsequently came to be known as the transistor. Many of us came from hard-working middle class families, where the sole bread earners were our fathers, most of whom worked for the government in various departments or ministries. But there was, despite the poverty or the struggle, intense joy in reading. There were many among us who visited the libraries, big or small, which were located in different parts of town, and came away with books which would turn out to be instrumental in expanding our knowledge of the world.
Sixty years ago, marriages were a fairy tale, unlike the loud music, mostly Hindi, which we hear today at weddings in our villages and towns. The bridegroom, if he were travelling by launch on the river, would be received by his in-laws on the riverbank. Holding his handkerchief to his mouth --- he was expected to demonstrate his shyness as a matter of courtesy --- he would proceed to the bride's home.
Once the marriage was solemnised, the groom would be required to place sweets in his bride's mouth. The shy bride, eyes closed, would daintily part the petals of her lips and have that offering taken. Those marriages were a joy, for they brought whole clans together. In those marriages was heritage symbolised. Wedding arches were made of banana trees.
At the political level, the world sixty years ago was a canvas for much drama to be enacted. Not all of us schoolboys read the newspapers, but some who did recall the many ways in which politics was shaping up everywhere. In 1964, French President Charles de Gaulle caused alarm among his fellow western leaders by his recognition of the People's Republic of China.
In that year, Zhou En-lai undertook a long trip to Africa. China was an emerging power, detonating its first atomic bomb in 1964. In May of the year, Jawaharlal Nehru died, and Lal Bahadur Shastri succeeded him as India's Prime Minister. In Pakistan, preparations were in full swing for the election of 80,000 Basic Democrats, who in January of the following year would elect the country's President.
There were convulsions in the Soviet Union, whose powerful leader Nikita Khrushchev was removed from office by a troika of Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny and Alexei Kosygin. In the United States, Lyndon Johnson, who had taken over as President following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, soundly defeated Barry Goldwater at the presidential election in November. In Britain, the Labour Party led by Harold Wilson beat the ruling Conservatives of Alec-Douglas Home at the elections and took control of 10 Downing Street.
Iran's Shah, Turkey's Kemal Gursel and Pakistan's Ayub Khan cobbled a regional body called Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD) into shape. The RCD would not last long. The Brazilian army overthrew President Joao Goulart and Eisaku Sato became Prime Minister of Japan. Nelson Mandela and his associates were tried and sentenced to jail terms in apartheid South Africa.
It was a different world, particularly for those of us who went to school in 1964. Our fathers were perfect gentlemen, sticklers for discipline where their children's lives were concerned. Our mothers had long tresses and would be aghast at the idea of having their hair cut short in order to be regarded as modern. For them, modernity rested on the idea of modesty. They wore sarees or shalwar kameezes.
There were the little stirrings of romance we felt as boys for the girls next door, which was quite natural. We studied hard in school, poring over books that were part of the syllabi, for we were all in competition with one another. We devoured the books we found in the libraries and then imagined ourselves as the heroic figures in those stories.
Sixty years ago, life was simpler and had its own grace and elegance. We remain grateful that there were no emails or Facebook messenger, for letter writing was a charming habit with us. We wrote to our grandparents, who not only preserved those letters but also sent back their warm responses. In 1964, we mercifully had no laptops or computers to pound away on when it came to writing articles.
We wrote in longhand and all those essays were checked and corrected by our teachers, each one of whom knew what teaching was all about. We were careful not to commit any infractions in our dealings with them. We were afraid of them and yet our love for them was beyond measure. They were the gurus who prepared us for the future.
In 1964, life was beautiful. Life was poetry.

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