Witnessing the advent of modernity and country's changing social fabric

As HT marks 100 years, a look at centenarians whose lives have stood witness to India's transformation

- Hitender Rao

Ranjit Singh Sandhu finds modernity in the little things. At 101, after a lifetime of experiences, the appreciation helps him. Born on January 1, 1923 in a shanty with mud walls and straw roof in Mohri, Haryana, Sandhu appreciates the plush, multistoreyed home he now lives in, on the same spot, in the same village. Sandhu worked as a farmer for much of his life, toiling away under the brutal Haryana sun on fields of pumpkin, sugarcane.

Those fields are now gone.

His family moved to Mohri, in Kurukshetra district, from Tarn Taran, a town in Punjab, decades ago.

As the years unfurled, Sandhu watched modernity spring up around him - at home, and beyond. He watched in realtime as communication evolved. In a village still largely untouched by the ferocious growth of artificial intelligence or other hot-button tech, Sandhu appreciates basic amenities. After all, as he said, "When we were young, horses used to deliver the mail."

A changing world

The charpai Sandhu sits on barely registers his weight. The thick jute rope is taut. A thin, coarse cotton towel is wrapped around his head like a turban.

A flat screen TV is nestled on the wall across his charpai, where he sleeps. "He only uses the TV to listen to gurbani," says Jaskeerat Sandhu, his great-grandson.

"The highway connecting Delhi to Amritsar extended till Lahore. The British used horses to send letters and posts from here to Lahore and vice versa," he said.

Then came the railway line.