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Growing up, did your family have a living room showcase/display cabinet specifically to show off souvenirs and curios from travels? I’m wondering if this was primarily a middle-class Indian thing until the early 90s or so, or if people did that in other parts of the world.
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Especially before TV (I was 10 before our town got TV), families visiting each other was the primary entertainment, and admiring each other’s showcase items was the main entertainment besides gossip about mutuals. They were literally conversation pieces.
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Thinking about how the “showcase era” fits between the era when almost everything was locally sourced and few people owned anything from more than a few miles away, to today, when almost everything you own is likely from China. Supply chain liminal passage.
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The interesting thing is the display items weren’t always actual souvenirs. For eg we had a Barbie doll and a few matchbox cars in there from my dad’s first trip abroad in 1979 that my sister and I didn’t play with. They were for “show.”
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The prestige of the showcase was a function of the distance the things had come and the travel stories attached. Having distant objects was more prestigious than having tasteful ones, though that changed as travel became more common.
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On his later trips as he grew more senior in his career, and traveled more, my dad mainly brought back smaller, more expensive, more tasteful items, over magnets-and-mugs grade tourist trap junk (back when those were still special and not all made in China).
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The custom kinda collapsed after India liberalized in the 90s, domestic and foreign travel became more routine due to software, and everyday things began to be global-sourced. India had extremely strong import substitution policies till ~90. Most things were domestically made.
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I think people who grew up post-globalization have no sense of how special “foreign” was before 🤔 Almost everything was locally sourced and very little was any good 🤣
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