In the days of yore, a visit to the railway station or to a cinema hall meant that we children pestered our parents no end to allow us to climb on to a curious looking contraption called the weighing machine with flashy multi-colored blinking lights, not so much to check our weight with which we had no concern but just for the joy of it.
In those days life was easy and to wrangle a twenty-five paisa coin from father was indeed a great achievement. On stepping into the weighing machine, a red and white disc would whirl for a few seconds and after coming to a stop the coin had to be introduced in a slot.
A few grunts and a film tune later, a small card, much like the train tickets of the manual days, would pop out showing our weight and future with the picture of a popular movie star or a dusky starlet thrown in for good measure.
We would then grab the fruit of our labour with delightful glee and wave it to our parents as a sure sign of our well-deserved victory because many a time the ticket would simply refuse to show up resulting in a rap from father for wasting his money on a dud weighing machine.
This entire operation not only interested us but also many other onlookers too who would stare at the machine in wondrous awe for achieving such a great feat.
Alas, we have now been robbed of these simple joys of life and the weighing machines are a thing of the past. The single-screen film theatres have given way to swanky multiplexes which now have no place for obsolete relics.
The railways too have dispensed with them due to fledgling demand due to the availability of fancier digital weight machines which are perceived more accurate and are available in almost every home, especially the more weight conscious ones. But the nostalgia of the past just refuses to fade away.