I was thinking about 2005 recently. It feels like yesterday. I can still remember that period of my life quite clearly. But then I realized that 2005 was 21 years ago.

Twenty-one years! The children who were in diapers in 2005 can legally purchase liquor in USA.

For my children, who were born in the 2010s, 2005 is ancient history. It belongs to a time before they existed. To me it was the year I graduatef from engineering college in Agra. They know about it through photographs, stories, and things they read or watch. But for me, 2005 doesn’t feel particularly old. It feels like a part of my life that I can still reach back to without much effort.

This got me thinking about my childhood and my parents.

In 1996, I was growing up, and 1975 was 21 years in the past. To me, 1975 seemed like a very long time ago. It belonged to another generation. The world was different, people dressed differently, and the photographs looked old.

But what about my parents?

For them, 1975 probably felt the way 2005 feels to me today. They might have remembered their friends, their daily routines, their worries, and the things they were looking forward to. What seemed like distant history to me was simply a part of their lives.

I never thought about it that way when I was younger.

I understood that my parents had been young once. I had seen their photographs and heard their stories. But I don’t think I understood that those memories might have felt as recent to them as my memories of 2005 feel to me now.

And now I find myself in exactly the same position.

There is something interesting about how we perceive time. Twenty-one years is twenty-one years, regardless of when we were born. Yet those years can seem like a lifetime to one person and just a few years to another.

Perhaps it is because we experience our own lives as a continuous journey. I don’t think of 2005 as a historical period. I think of it as a time when I was younger. I was a different person in many ways, but I still recognize that person as myself.

My children cannot make that connection. For them, 2005 is something to learn about. For me, it is something to remember.

I wonder how often my parents felt this way when I was growing up. When they talked about their childhood or younger years, perhaps they were surprised that I considered those times so distant. Perhaps they wondered how something that felt so recent to them could seem so old to me.

And I probably never noticed.

Now consider 2047. It will be 21 years from today. By then, my children will be adults, perhaps with children of their own. They might look back at 2026 and wonder how it could possibly have been 21 years ago. Their children might look at photographs from today and see a completely different world.

The same conversation could happen again.

What I find most interesting is that we don’t notice our own present becoming someone else’s past.

There is no particular day when a year stops feeling recent and starts feeling old. We simply continue living, carrying our memories with us. Meanwhile, another generation grows up without having experienced the world we remember.

It also changes how I think about my parents. When they spoke about the past, they weren’t necessarily talking about history. They were talking about their lives. Just as I do now.

Perhaps this is one of those things that we can understand intellectually when we are young, but only appreciate fully as we grow older.

And perhaps, the next time my children think that 2005 was a very long time ago, I will remember how I used to think about 1975.