It's "then", forever !!

I am 54 & therefore, groomed largely in the 20th century.
Yeah! I missed World War II without regret, but I remember tuning and retuning our vintage valve radio receiver onto 25 meter band short wave to be informed by the VOA (Voice of America) on 22 Nov1963 that JFK had been assassinated. I wept unashamedly because he seemed so young, handsome & vibrant.

In the sixties and seventies life was a lot simpler; for one thing we didn’t have a bewildering plethora of things to choose from and everything from gramophone record players to grimy jeeps looked solid & dependable as if they would last a lifetime. They were all invariably made in England or USA; hats off to them!
The skies were clearer then, the weather less mischievous & believe it or not, the milkman had not started adding water to the milk! In school, one either worked and got good grades or one didn’t and flunked in a blaze of glory - no one cheated, NOT ONE!

Only one newspaper ie the very burra sahib “The Statesman”, published in Calcutta, was available in Kalimpong those days and it reached 2 days late. Nevertheless, we waited for hungrily for each paper since it brought in vivid images and stories of the giants of the era like Martin Luther King jr. and Pandit Nehru or of earth shattering events like the Vietnam war and the Moon landing.

The other sources of entertainment were, of course, the turntable and the ubiquitous radio. Elvis was taking the world by storm those days and many nerve-racking moments were spent trying to fine tune wheezy a transistor to quickly work out the guitar chords to “It’s now or never”. When the EPs and LPs started flooding in, things became easier but they didn't come cheap and I burnt a big hole in my pocket each time I walked into a music store…

Ahh! Things are different now!!

It’s a weird, wired world these days. Wires run underground, underwater, over ground, even through mountains and there are spies in the sky which don’t even require any wires at all! So, one might get Bluetooth eating Blackberry or sit on top of Mt Everest and blog one's heart out.
It’s a blizzard of mind numbing, confusing terms, technologies and things which assaults and overwhelms ones senses- 24X7.

So with all due respect,

I prefer the 20^th to the 21^st …

and it’s not now or never

rather,
its "then" forever!