It is commonplace today to see all ages with all kinds of gadgets. They click and swipe and tap and whatever they want to do, gets done. If they fall into the bracket of ‘older people’ and they are not using the very latest in technology (an iPhone 5 say, when the iPhone 6 is already available), chances are that they have been handed down their children’s ‘old models’ — and their children have upgraded to the newest in the market.
How different things were a couple of decades ago!
Then, as the younger generation, we were happy to collect all the discards from our parents and make do with them. It could be the old carved walnut-wood peg table set that had served our family well for years — but was now just too tiring for seniors to keep dust free. It could be the heavily embroidered Kashmiri bedspread that refused to lose its colour and sheen — but was too heavy for older arms to spread out, fold when not in use, and wring and hang out to dry when being laundered. It could be the large cooking vessels that were shelved when there was only the minimum of cooking going on for the elderly couple ... and since we were experimenting with entertaining a minimum of two dozen friends (six of mine, six of his — and their respective partners) it was natural for us to welcome all these items.
Our home therefore had a patchwork effect, with odds and ends from both sets of parents, picked up not only from each one’s places of origin, but also from the various corners of the country that our parents had visited in the course of their careers.
Still going strong
There were comfortable cane stools from Shillong in the Northeast of India; there was a wicker-covered garrafao (demijohn) from Goa that was converted into a lamp; there was a traditional South Indian snack mould to help me make everyone’s favourite murukkus (savoury snacks) and biscuit cutters and cake tins from my mother in shapes that had thrilled my siblings and me from the time we were three or four years old.
All of these were precious and all of these were used and re-used — and enjoyed — for longer than we care to admit. What’s more, most of them are still going strong, with more life in them than we now have ...
But we cannot pass them on to the next generation — the ‘Now’ generation — as we would like to. No longer in different parts of the country but scattered in different parts of the globe, they find these too heavy to carry away — even if they planned to use them. Familial sentiment and a sense of continuity are good up to a point, but with all those easy-to-clean kitchen tools, easy-to-pack, easy-to-assemble items of furniture, easy-to-launder modern upholstery and linen available to them, they shy away from making their everyday lives more complicated.
They have moved with the times and they now insist that we do too. To this end, they get us not only electronic goodies that they think we need, but they also pile on all manner of things that we don’t need and we don’t know how to operate.
It would be relatively easy to manage with our houseful of tried and tested old equipment that we are used to. But now we have become the sandwich generation — sandwiched between those sturdy old things we received from our parents and the sleek new ones we receive from our children — and we don’t know how to handle it all anymore.
But, because for us it is still sentiment all the way, we cling to both hand-me-downs and hand-me-ups, completely incapable of discarding either ...
Cheryl Rao is a freelance journalist based in India.