Those who were born in India around 1980s are the folks who have seen the maximum changes Indian society has gone through. I guess the black & white television tops the chart who actually revolutionized the society , the government ran single TV channel DD National & later introduced DD Metro kept India engaged for decades, provided news ,entertainment and everything. And then by late 90's with cable TV's wide arrival everyone tasted unlimited 24 X 7 supply of entertainment (news , movies , TV serials , sports etc ) via various local , foreign channels. It happened only in late 90's when having a land line phone connection became a reality for common masses who ultimately lost the battle to its successor mobile phones in the new century. It was only in the mid 90's when Indian students first saw desktop computers and early version of windows in some of the privileged schools. It was also only in the 80's when buying a car became a reality for middle class.
It's 2012 now most of us (most means 1.2 billions) are connected to high speed broadband connections (internet) , we have colored HD screen laptops or other variants of high speed computing devices, we are connected to the whole world in a way , we have access to almost all type of news every second , we have access to all good or bad information, history, geography, science , literature and what not.
But, one thing I remember the most which we (at least I know a few who had) saw so humbly in 80's is this piece of colored plastic screen, which gave us all joy. It was easily available in TV shops. To make a b&w TV screen look like a colored one, you just had to fix this screen over your b&w screen, simple. It basically was a plastic sheet that was of the same size of your black and white TV screen. It had some six to seven colors filled across the screen in some pattern. In our screen I remember it was a very colorful map of India over that plastic sheet , blue color on the top of the map, green in the middle, light red on the bottom , light yellow on right , orange on left and something like this colored everywhere.
Like most of the others we also had a b&w TV (ours was a Jolly StarTrek an Indian brand ) and this colored plastic screen, which we often used to overlay over the screen to enjoy colors those days. So, you had an instant color TV , whenever you attached this colored screen on the black and white TV screen. Gone are those good days, its the new smart LED 3D TV time with some very shallow broadcasting going on.
~Thanks
