..when school classes didn't have Whatsapp groups; when, if you had been absent from school, procuring the missed 'notes' meant visiting a classmate's home to copy it, or hurriedly gobbling up your lunch to make time for copying from the borrowed notebook of your bench-mate..
..when having nothing to do for a while would have led to sitting and gazing over whatever was happening outside the window, rather than tinkering with Windows..
..when the opportunity to look at someone's photo came only when they showed you the glossy print of the tangible physical copy (while you tried not to smudge it too much with your fingerprints); when there was no notion of a 'DP' and being able to see a person's picture without their knowledge would simply have been considered creepy..
..when children played on the streets among themselves and had never heard of playing AmongUs indoors..
..when 'bandwidth' would have made you think of waist size, 'cookie' of chocolate chips, 'followers' of disciples or stalkers, 'platform' of roadsides, 'tiktok' of clocks; when 'flash' would have come only from your torch, 'filters' would have been for your tea, 'feed' would have meant giving your baby food, and the only thing 'viral' would have been your cold..
..when, saying 'binge-watch','netflix', 'reddit' or 'retweet', would have made people think you were delirious with high fever; when writing 'flickr' and 'tumblr' would have made your teacher complain about your poor spelling..
..when weeks before summer vacation, your inbox would not have been suddenly bombarded with endless posters and advertisements for miraculous summer camps that promised to transform your child in the span of a few weeks into a multitalented Leonardo da Vinci, complete with expert coding, theatre and pottery skills, and superhuman memory power to boot..
..when people wrote full words and sentences instead of abbreviations; when, after sending a whole well-crafted paragraph of your opinion, you would not have got a reply that said "K"..
..when people captured memories more in their heads than in their handheld devices..
..when the whole family watched the same show on the television together and someone would shout "come quickly, it's back!" if you had left to use the bathroom during the commercial break; when, if you missed an episode, you had to hear about it from your friends or colleagues the next day and would not have been able to catch up with it on Prime Video..
..when kids listened in awe to the tales from the lips of their grandparents, rather than the grandparents having to listen in awe as the kid impatiently showed them how to attach an image to an e-mail; when we learnt from the elderly instead of the elderly struggling to keep up with us..
..when letters were handwritten, food was home cooked and friendships were more real.