Why do we miss our middle-class-ness?

Somewhere down the lane, without you realizing success changes your life.

While success, money, technology bring lots of new excitement, experiences fulfilling newer needs and desires also reduce a lot of joys of middle-class life to memories of the past.

Here are a few middle-class moments we all deeply miss:

Sharing ill-fitted clothes of your elder brother as a kid/teenager. However, even if you resist, it had to happen for expensive terry cot or terylene shirts or even because of everlasting Bata shoes. We virtually had to drag feet on rough concrete roads to make rubber burn and make holes in the shoes to get newer one's, or to stop passing them on to our younger brothers.

All the siblings to share the same design and fabric for every festival courtesy family tailor, who brings a "tann" at a cheaper rate.

Advance booking of textbooks from a friendly neighbourhood senior student, if you did not have an elder brother or sister studying in the same school.

How could you escape the Nepaliwalla's sweater for winters or your mom's ill-knitted one, which became loose and two sizes bigger for your younger brother after three months of use or abuse?

Coconut oil and Shikakai. "Head-bath" is a ritual for every festival and an auspicious day in our childhood. Oily head was fine since it's done on holidays but shikakai homemade shampoo used to burn the eyes and make them red for a day at the least.

Listening to radio cricket commentary and keeping detailed scorecard, not to mention the suffering from Narotham Puri. And of course the ting tongs of "Vividh bharathi".

An excuse of stomach aches to get free taste of Unani medicine.

Homemade Kulfi, sweets and even Diwali crackers, watching adults make firecrackers at home was the most amazing sight of excitement, and stealing them while drying was even more exciting.

Life on a terrace is a chapter by itself, starting from combined studies, to leching at girls, to sleeping on the terrace in summer nights, to family night outs to endless "Antakshari" sessions, to stealing "drying vadams & cut mango pieces.

The very best of cheap and best mentality, repair and reuse, make it at home, homemade remedies v/s specialty clinics. Mom & Dads always found innovative ways to fulfil needs without spending much money and this very sprit of parents is vanishing very quickly.

I thank my parents, grandparents and my brothers for giving me such a wonderful and humane middle=class-way of life.