Time flew by quickly. There are only five more minutes for the clock to strike ten. I have no worries. I will reach Ulloor junction within a minute. This confidence I am exhibiting now is not good. It implies I have accepted that this is not a dream and whatever that has happened is real. The faint-hearted that I am, I know this will not last. I better make the best of it.

I get out of the building, walk towards my scooter and ride away. I head straight for Ulloor Junction. I reach just in time. I take out the walkie-talkie from the bag and wait. I cycle through the channels. All I hear is static.

Ten minutes in, I send another message.

‘Hello. I am here in Ulloor Junction waiting for anyone who is hearing this message. I will be here for some more time after which I will be going back to my home in Pongumoodu. If you are finding it difficult to reach me, don't worry. Take your time. I will be here at this time tomorrow. Please be brave and stay strong. My name is David. Over and out.’

I decide to wait till ten thirty. Something inside me tells me I need to get back home. But I also know there is not much point in it. Maybe I should go around the city and see its status.

I really want to have a good cup of tea. I look around for any small tea shops. All the restaurants are closed. There used to be a small roadside tea stall a few feet away from where I am sitting alongside the road. It used to be open till late at night. It was the only one on these premises. One could always find a couple of them near the medical college.

While in college, after coming back from a second show, if we felt a need to have tea or a coffee, we would get down as the bus reached Ulloor. This is a route through which most of the long-distance buses running in the Alleppey - Ernakulam route ply. Since there is no dearth of buses, we knew we wouldn’t be left stranded even if it became late. Back then the tea stall would remain open till twelve at the night. After I moved to Trivandrum I have seen this shop serving late into the night a couple of times. Covid has forced many of these late-night shops to shut down and function at mandated hours. The second wave brought in a curfew after ten pm. It lasted for two months after which the norms were relaxed. I saw the shop serving tea at eleven on one occasion. I don't know if it stays up late as before. I can’t find the shop now. There is no trace of the wheeled cart that transformed into the stall. Maybe it is parked somewhere else.

I took my bachelor's degree from Trivandrum. It was a time when the city was growing and expanding. It was fuelled by the establishment of Techno Park in Kazhakootam. It was turning into a major suburb, catering to the needs of the techies that came in hordes to work here. It grew at an unprecedented pace. Almost a decade after I passed out, the city has changed to fit the needs of these techies. The suburb has grown and completely transformed. More projects are coming up as the year's pass, leading to more construction and development, thereby resulting in a change in the landscape of the city.

The Trivandrum which was once known to be a government servants' city because of the laid-back culture and vibe it gave, was undergoing a radical shift. Along with this, changes are coming in the mentality of the people living here. The pace of the city has definitely increased. Although it keeps a laid-back vibe, as the sun sets, people ditch their homes and come out to explore the city to consume what it has to offer. I have seen the shift over the years. Since the pandemic happened the growth has plateaued. The active lifestyle has taken a break, waiting for things to get back to a new normal. This new normal will be backed by the tech-savvy fast-paced generation that is calling this city their home.

One metric that can be used to see how the city has grown should be the number of restaurants that have opened up in the past decade. When I passed out of college, the most well-known and prominent food joint in the city was Zam-Zam. It was famous for the quality of food it served. Getting a table after dusk meant waiting. One can always see a group waiting right behind a table that is going to be done. It was a place students flocked to whenever they wanted to organize a treat. For the price point, their various grilled dishes and desserts quickly got a loyal fan following. A decade later the brand has grown itself, having multiple branches in various parts of the city. I visited one of their outlets near Kazhakootam. We were surprised to find the place full. We had to wait for more than twenty minutes to get a seat. There wasn’t an empty table till the time we left. The night curfew was still on. Just an hour was left for the shop to close. People were still coming in. This came as a big shocker to me. I had never expected to see such a huge crowd during these Covid times. Even though the restaurant was seven kilometers away from where we stayed, we never entertained the possibility of dining at the restaurant. We resorted to ordering in and having it safely in our house.

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This decade that I talked about is worth mentioning. It saw the advent of the smartphone and 4G networks. It completely changed the way Indians went about their daily lives. When I passed out and joined my workplace, SMS was the way we messaged. I remember a colleague of mine coming over and urging me to try a new app called WhatsApp. It used the internet to send messages. I liked the idea of it. It was a time when people were starting to buy their first smartphones. Some of them had it with them, others were using Nokia or Samsung handsets. 3G was picking up speed. People were recharging to get data in their handsets. I was using a normal phone I had borrowed from my mother. A few months later, I got myself a smartphone. One of the first things I did was install WhatsApp. All my friends were slowly using the app for messaging. It was the advent of instant messaging and WhatsApp was certainly the app we all needed. Soon sending SMS was a thing of the past. One sent an SMS when he was out of the internet or couldn’t get a message across WhatsApp. WhatsApp made messaging easy and free. It revolutionized the way we communicated with our near and dear ones. It would quietly replace the SMS app from our smartphones.

I have friends who had joined colleges when this revolution began and saw it become a part of their daily lives as they passed out. I feel they are a generation apart. There is hardly half a decade gap between us. Yet I feel they are a generation that has had the opportunity to ingrain technology in their daily lives.

I am no one to say if this is good or bad. It is not my concern. I belong to a very transitionary generation. I have seen a lot of changes happen in my lifetime. My brother, who was born in the 21st century has very little knowledge of how things were different a decade back. The decade that was my childhood. By the time he was ten, a lot of things had changed. Things have come, held the attention of people for a while, and slowly phased out by a modern entity. He can’t relate to it. But I can. I saw it happen. I don't know if it is a privilege of some sort. I bask in it from time to time and yearn to go back to the times when things were much simpler. In the process of making things more accessible to us, I feel we have inadvertently made things complex. I can’t define it the way I want to. The concept lies in my head. I don't think I would be able to produce it in words.

I think it was the simplicity back then that gave it a surreal charm I wish for in today's date. The simplicity that a letter brought on, or of making STD trunk calls to your grandparents, the prospect of meeting your friends for a get-together over the weekend and getting to play all sorts of games, one after the other with your friends. These were simple and elegant. I don't think anyone of us cherished it for what it was. Those days came by and went away. We enjoyed it to the max. We never thought that times would change and one day we would sit and yearn for it with eager hearts. When I talk to a couple of childhood friends I am still in contact with, we always end up talking about the old days. We try to recollect what happened on certain eventful days, those embarrassing moments that made the memories.

Mom still misses those days. She says those were the days when technology was minimal and to the point. The major tech things to inhabit a home were the phone, the fridge, Cable TV for the latest news, serials, and movies, the cassette player that gave way to the CD player, the music system that played tapes, and my video game system. I have spent hours and hours in it playing games like Contra and Mario with my friends. The kitchen was very much manual except for the oven. Some had washing machines in their homes. We bought it later.

I had lots of board games and action figures to play with. I got lost in them. They can easily kill time. After school, some days my best friend used to come to our house. There was a small playground right in front of it. We used to play cricket, football or badminton. On other days we would come together in someone else house and embark on a long video game session. The idea would be to play till the end, defeat the boss and finish it. During the winter months, the video game sessions would happen cuddled under the blankets.

The only place I came across a PC was in the school my father taught. Whenever I visited him, he would let me sit on the PC and fiddle with it. Windows 98 was the operating system back then. I would spend my time mostly on paint. Later on, when the internet came, I got to see my father work on it. There wasn’t much to work on back then. E-mails were catching up. The connections were pretty lousy. They would disconnect from time to time. I remember the distinct dial-up tone the modem made as it tried to establish a connection. In his office, if one had to use the internet, they had to pull the plug on the telephone. Sometimes when he was not watching, I would open up one of the games installed in it and play. Games fascinate me.

Till high school, I used to religiously sit and play all the games I could get my hands on. I liked strategy games the most. The whole idea of buying a PC came up after playing Age of Empires on my friend's PC. I had to convince my father that the computer was for educational purposes - to make powerpoints, browse encyclopedias and gather information for my projects. He bought one for me in my ninth standard. My gaming days restarted back then. By then the charm of video games had gone away. They were being made obsolete. Soon they would be a thing of the past. Two years later my father bought me a PlayStation. It changed the way we gamed. Multiplayer games became a craze and took up all my time.

But I always came back to PC games. I felt happy playing strategy games. I was a big fan of the Gameboy games that were emulated on PC. Pokemon ruled the medium, followed by Zelda and the lot.

Times were changing. We were all right in the middle of it. Only now when we look at it in retrospect can we see the changes our lives had undergone.