India, Sept. 18 -- I've been looking at the '80s throwbacks, of what people looked like or might have looked like then, and it's been fun to see the big hair, vivid makeup and padded shoulders. But I couldn't help but think: how little these trends capture of that era.

Middle-class Indian cities were an entirely different world then. Let me fill in the rest of the picture for you.

In offices, computers were still years away. We used typewriters for everything. There were sleek portable ones for personal use, while offices had the big, heavy-duty machines. Their clackety-clack was a constant hum in offices.

One had to have white correction fluid handy, to cover up typing mistakes. There was no Ctrl-Z or backspace, and no one wanted to s...