Shantanu Naidu, now a General Manager at Tata Motors and a close associate of late industrialist Ratan Tata, recently reflected on the days of growing up without modern technology.
In a video he posted on LinkedIn, the 32-year-old Naidu sat down to put his socks on for work as he took the viewers on a trip down memory lane.
“Don’t know if I have any Marathi followers, but come walk with me to a time when technology didn’t plague us,” his caption read.
Speaking in Marathi, he then recalled how summer vacations were filled with laughter, outdoor games, and mischief, adding that the best part was that wasn’t a single phone.
He then talked about summer vacations which were spent running through different alleys and playing games.
He then jokingly added that someone or the other would always be complaining to their mother about being troubled by other kids, which happened to be him.
Playtime would then end at 7 pm when it was time for evening prayers, but his friends would hide him so well that his mother couldn’t find him.
He also recounted the thrill of “stealing mangoes and blackberries, chasing butterflies, racing bicycles, and debating which cycle had gears or which motorcycle could best pretend to be a Neeta Volvo bus.”
“It is my generation’s biggest privilege that we didn’t have phones. And yet, all the memories are fresh pictures in our minds,” Naidu reflected.
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“Childhood would have been destroyed by phones. And now that we are adults, adulthood is getting destroyed by them,” he added. “But those were truly the days. What fortune to have grown up without phones.”
His post which has so far, gotten well over 6,000 likes and nearly 200 comments, got a flurry of responses.
“And I’m only envious and angry that I can’t offer the same privilege to my growing toddler son now,” wrote a user. “I can’t remove smart phones around him and allow him to enjoy the beauty of play without worrying about sound of phones”
Another wrote that “everything was stores in our memories which never asked for paying for additional memory storage like today we pay to either Google or any other storage device.”
Naidu became General Manager and Head of Strategic Initiatives at Tata Motors last month, being the fifth generation of his family to work for the Group.
