We are the first generation that recorded music off the radio!
That watched films on video!
And spent endless hours, happily glued to the Atari joystick, playing games that were anything but complicated.
We are the last generation of storytelling nights around the Korsi!*
The last to gather in cheerful evening get-togethers—without Instagram, Telegram, or the Internet. The last generation to sit late into the night listening to tales of jinn and the supernatural, waiting each week for “Mr. Filmi”* to arrive with his Samsonite case full of low-quality movies—scratched, jumpy, and so often replayed they either ruined the VCR head or came spewing out like a tangled mess of tape. Sometimes the whole film looked as though rain was falling across the TV screen.
We lived through photography with 36-exposure rolls of film, waiting days for them to be developed, only to discover whether the pictures had turned out well—or poorly.
We are the only generation that, like autumn caught between summer and winter, lived through two completely different eras.
Perhaps only the 1980s gave us a brief taste of calm, a decade when life felt a little sweet… We are an endangered generation. We children of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s (Iranian calendar: 1340s, 1350s, 1360s) shared so much in common. We forties, fifties, and sixties kids belong to a generation that will never return again.
We remember the smell of old water cisterns and public bathhouses, but we also know the luxury of sitting in a jacuzzi, enjoying a hot-water massage.
We were the ones who went on Sizdah Bedar* picnics in a Citroën Dyane or a Iran’s assembeled Paykan cars, and just a few years later stood open-mouthed on city streets counting Porsche and Maserati cars as they passed.
We are a strange generation: yesterday, we made phone calls with a two-rial coin; today, we transfer money with a mobile phone.
We are an exceptional generation. The ones before us did not live this way, and the ones after us never will.
Sometimes our wristwatches were made using our teeth, because we set the watch handels by biting and pulling at them, orby using the tip of a BIC Ballpoint Pen. Later, we strapped Apple Watches and Samsung smartwatches to our wrists. Yes… we traveled a very long road overnight.
The generations before us left without ever seeing this avalanche of modern wonders, and the generations after us will come along never knowing the scent of fresh notebooks and the rough pages of cheap school paper at the start of September.
We are the last generation of kids playing in the allyways.
And perhaps the only generation that feels as if everything has been snatched away from us and we’ve been hurled back into the past—as if nothing ever changed; no one ever tried, and nothing ever happened
We were the generation that saw both those killed in war by the foreign enemy and those killed in the streets by…
Ours is a generation like no other — and there will never be another like it.
- Korsi, pronounced Kor-see. Anyone who has lived in Iran will have very fond memories of cold nights spent sitting around a Korsi to keep warm. A Korsi is incredibly easy to make, it is simply made from a short square table covered with a large comforter or thick blanket. In modern days instead of a tray of burning coals, an electric heater is placed underneath the table. Comfortable cushions are arranged on the floor around the Korsi for people to sit on.The idea is to sit on the cushion and cover the bottom portion of your body with the comforter that lays over the table.
- Mr. Filmi. “For a time, when foreign films — especially Hollywood movies — had no chance of being released theatrically in Iran, there were people who smuggled them in on VHS tapes and delivered them directly to people’s homes. They were known as Mr. Filmi. Of course, with the rise of online streaming, that business disappeared long ago.
- Sizdah Bedar – is an annual Iranian festival held thirteen days after Nowruz, which is on the thirteenth day of Farvardin, the first month of the Iranian calendar, during which people spend time picnicking outdoors. It marks the end of the Nowruz holidays in Iran.
