If you, the reader, were born within the last 25 years, you've grown up in an India of glitzy malls, swish condominiums, multiscreen theatres, specialty restaurants, supermarkets, and air-conditioned classrooms.
That’s the world you are used to.
I grew up before this radical reshaping of India’s big cities. Our family was firmly middle class, and we got our first air conditioner, when I was fourteen. That too, because the doctor had recommended it for my mother’s high blood pressure.
Every night, my sister and I made our bed on the carpet in my parents' bedroom, so we could enjoy the communal coolness of the air conditioner.
Now, many middle-class homes have air conditioners in every room.
Back in the late 1980s, we didn’t have McDonald’s, KFC, or Domino’s. We ate Big Boy burgers, mutton sausage pizza, and Hot Chocolate Fudge at Nirula’s. Not as fast food, but as a proper restaurant meal. There were no malls. In fact, right after I got married in the early 2000s, my wife and I hired a car for fun and made a day trip from Delhi to Gurgaon to go mall-hopping. It was that much of a novelty back then.
Yet, what we had at that time, and you don’t now, was an optimistic belief that our material lives would keep improving.