2000s kids, assemble: Time to relive your core memories

How much do you remember of the first decade of the millennium? (And the best one. Don’t @ us!) Pull up your jeans, fold the flip phone away, put some EDM on and enjoy the nostalgia overload

1. The muse: Poo in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. This is peak Kareena Kapoor, paying it rich, snotty but impossible to hate. Karan Johar’s 2001 film came at a time when Indians were just getting comfortable with their place in the world. There was money to flaunt. And women were owning their power. Actor and content creator Ramona Arena, who played Poo’s bestie Sonya in K3G, says Poo became an icon because “her independence was a threat, especially to men and women that expect other women to pander to men.”

How low did low-rise jeans go? Let’s just say we can recall some people’s buttcracks from memory. (ILLUSTRATION BY JAYANTO)

2. The look: How low did low-rise jeans go? Let’s just say we can recall some people’s hip bones and buttcracks from memory. For a little more coverage, there were stretchy velour Juicy Couture pants with matching jackets. For accessories, there were Lancôme Juicy Tube lip gloss, the Rachel haircut, a tiny baguette bag, an owl pendant, and gold hoop earrings. On men, Oakley sunnies, Nick Carter’s mushroom boy bangs, Ed Hardy muscle tees and loose jeans worn so low, they made guys trip every few steps. Isha Bhansali, celebrity fashion stylist and consultant, says it was the last truly creative moment in everyday fashion. “Now there’s information overload through social media. There are no new trends.” One ’00s trend we should leave behind: “Skinny jeans! They’re so unflattering.”

Remember when all the cool kids turned to Torrents to illegally access movies and TV shows? (ILLUSTRATION BY JAYANTO)

4. The lingo: Chillax, dude. Put on some bling or just talk to the hand, fo shizzle. Slang terms from the ’00s reflect an India that was learning quickly from American pop culture and didn’t mind making Yo Mama jokes. PHAT stood for pretty, hot and tempting. It was also the era of SMS – users couldn’t send long messages, they were charged for every text they sent. So people just typed lyk dis, lol. Pia Desai, director of Comma Consulting PR, says that her pre-teen has been picking up tips from that era, opting for landlines, text shortcuts and non-smart phones. “They’re extra cautious in terms of data privacy – it’s a good middle ground.”

Everyone was cracking Yo Mama jokes and typing lyk dis, lol. (ILLUSTRATION BY JAYANTO)

5. The sound: Music channels were playing Alisha Chinai and Colonial Cousins. But there were new sounds in the mix – techno, EDM and club remixes of old Bollywood hits. “Industry insiders hated that they butchered the originals,” says Sunny Sarid, acoustic consultant and former DJ. But everyone was humming Kaanta Laga and Kaliyon Ka Chaman. Buddha Bar meant chillout lounge. We were today years old when we realised that Karunesh is actually German.

6. The TV shows: TV was still on TV then, and being on MTV Roadies was the ’00s version of going viral. Anmol Singh was freshly admitted to university in 2007, when she landed a spot on S5. “I was ecstatic. But on the show, I used to pray every night not to make a fool of myself during the tasks!” Reality shows were in their unhinged era. “We were real, raw. Now everyone knows how to dress, how to pose, what to say and whom to suck up to or fight with, just to play the audience and build a career.”

7. The poison: Reruns of Friends were getting more viewers than the OG telecast. Obviously, everyone watching wanted to hang out at a café too. We learnt to say “eSpresso” not “express-oh”, and that it wasn’t sweet. But we lingered, anyway. Content creator Surbhi Mahobia’s romance brewed here in the mid-Aughts. “My boyfriend (now my husband) and I spent our evenings there after work,” she says. “They were spaces for authentic connection, instead of over-curated, branded backdrops.”

We were all humming Kaanta Laga and Kaliyon Ka Chaman, while Buddha Bar meant chillout lounge. (ILLUSTRATION BY JAYANTO)

8. The other poison: If you weren’t into coffee, you were probably into wine. India was in the throes of a wine boom – new vineyards, local grapes and labels such as Dindori Reserve and Chateau Indage. Rich folks got invited to wine dinners, where everyone desperately tried to pair tandoori chicken with a nice glass of red. “The Indian Grape Processing Board was established in 2009. There was competition among wineries, so restaurants got good wine deals,” recalls food and travel writer Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi. It wasn’t great plonk. “Some of the wines we drank then would not fly today.”

9. The obsessions: 2000s kids don’t need Labubus. They saved up for Beyblades and the free tazos that were inside packets of Lays chips. Shikha Shah, founder of ScrapShala in Varanasi, grew her collection of tazos with her cousins. When Lays ran contests, they’d always enter and often win. “The joy was in the wait, the surprise, and the anticipation of receiving a response from Frito-Lay by post,” she recalls. “I’ve kept my tazos safe for more than 25 years.” They tend to fetch high prices in the collectibles market.

10. The national pastime: Long journey ahead without a screen or Wi-Fi? It was Antakshari to the rescue. On train journeys, fellow passengers were roped in to compete. On campuses, it was part of the college-fest lineup. Annu Kapoor and Pallavi Joshi hosted a TV version until 2007. Hyderabad-based writer Romila Chitturi recalls the “surreal” moment when she made it to one Republic Day special episode. “Antakshari wasn’t just a game, it was the soundtrack to family get-togethers, colony nights and parties – it was a way to socialise. Without phones to distract us, we sang without fear of being recorded or trolled.”

We were playing Antakshari on trains, on campus and on TV. (ILLUSTRATION BY JAYANTO)

11. The escape: By the turn of the millennium, we’d seen enough movie songs being shot abroad to have bucket-lists ready for our own vacations. First, we ventured where the budget allowed: Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore. Then on 12-day-7-country group tours of Europe. The packages allowed just enough time for photos at the major sights, before everyone was bussed back to the hotel for an Indian vegetarian buffet dinner.

12. The release: Of course, we loved nightclubs. The real fun, however, was at ticketed rain dances. Nanni Singh, founder of ShowCase Events, would organise them in Chandigarh and recalls how the team had to get paper cups, build a specific playlist and set up special stages to keep slush off the floor so revellers wouldn’t slip. “People connected dancing in the rain with sultry Bollywood songs,” she says. No one wastes water like this now, except at the odd posh wedding reception.

13. The voice: Keyboard warriors were just making their presence felt in the ’00s. Bloggers such as Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan (Compulsive Confessor), and Amit Varma (India Uncut) were writing about their personal lives and issues that big newspapers wouldn’t touch. Time’s Person of the Year in 2006? You - honouring the OG creators. Journalist Aneesha Mathur used her blog as a tell-all diary until it got in the way of her finding an arranged-marriage match. “I don’t know if that time was better, but it was new and it allowed us to express ourselves in a way we couldn’t otherwise,” she says.

Indian music was in overdrive abroad, be it The Bombay Dreams musical or Jay Sean. (ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAYANTO)

14. The reach: The India growth story was making headlines globally. Indian directors were casting every half-Indian-half-foreign hopeful in a movie or music video (but not Indians with Asian or Black heritage, alas). “In the newly emerging global village, NRIs shared the themes and dreams of aspirational Indian audiences,” says author and film historian, Dinesh Raheja. Even SRK played a returning NRI in the 2004 film Swades. And Indian music was in overdrive abroad. The Bombay Dreams musical took London’s West End and New York’s Broadway by storm. Jay Sean was everyone’s favourite singer. Shops in Istanbul played Mundian To Bach Ke. We did it all without an algorithm.

15. The challenge: All through the ’00s, the look was super skinny. Celebrities raved about the Atkins diet (yes to protein, no to carbs), the South Beach diet (yes to carbs and good fats) and juice cleanses that made everyone dizzy by the third day. Jennifer Aniston’s the Zone diet (40% carb, 30% protein, 30% fat) seemed actually doable. Deepika Dua Arora, founder of Mutation Diet Clinic, has seen trends come and go in her 20 years of practice. “Not every diet suits everyone,” she warns.

16. The breakaway: Multiplexes opened at the tail end of the 1990s. By the ’00s, they were helping a different kind of cinema bloom – there was finally room to tell contemporary stories just for an urban audience, swerve from the mass-market hero-villain formula, even cut back on songs and item numbers. We watched Monsoon Wedding, Bow Barracks Forever, and Khosla ka Ghosla. The bonus: Young couples could ditch shady public parks and canoodle in the smaller Screen 3, with less chance of being recognised.

Multiplexes led to new kinds of films, such as Monsoon Wedding and Khosla ka Ghosla. (ILLUSTRATION BY JAYANTO)

17. The tech: Could anything match the wonder of plugging into a fully charged iPod in 2001 and listening to music for a without ever having to change a CD or cassette? Or flipping open the slim Motorola Razr V3 to answer a call? Tech survived the Y2K scare and got personal in the ’00s. Mobile phones became less about phones and more about how much tech could fit into a handheld device. By 2004, people were switching from Orkut to Facebook. By 2006, we were tweeting and realising that 140 characters is enough to spew wisdom and hate.

18. The viral moment: YouTube was only two years old in 2007, when English dad Howard Davies-Carr uploaded a video of his son Charlie (aged 1) playfully chomping on the finger of his brother Harry (aged 3). Charlie Bit My Finger wasn’t just one of the first viral videos. We made it our own – sharing it, mixing it into songs, creating reaction videos and spoofs. It bound us all to a single moment, un-engineered, for the first time – with no marketing strategist showing us how.

We miss flipping open our Motorola Razr V3, and listening to music on our iPods. (ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAYANTO)

19. The new chapter: Indians have been writing about the diaspora and the essence of being Indian for years. But the new century gave the world two distinct kinds of readers. One kind read highbrow literary fiction, by Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh and Kiran Desai. The other began picking up stories aimed at local first-generation fiction readers. Chetan Bhagat thrived, as did Ashwin Sanghi, Anuja Chauhan, Samit Basu and Vikas Swarup. Neither side liked the other. They still don’t.

20. The phenomenon: The mid-Aughts were kind to conspiracy theories, recalls marketing professional Meetali Kutty. She describes Harry Potter as being “practically a religion” – JK Rowling was releasing the last few books of the series, but the movie versions of earlier ones were already in cinemas. Who is the Half-blood Prince? Does Dumbledore really die? On TV, everyone was hooked on to Lost, the show about flight passengers marooned on a mysterious island. “It seemed designed to keep conspiracy forums alive,” Kutty says. “Theories ranged from ‘they’re all dead’ to ‘the island is a government experiment’ to ‘the numbers are a cosmic code that ties into everything’.” Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code “convinced people that secret societies were hiding under the Louvre”. Theories were discussed on blogs, forums, and Tumblr - we found our tribe online. “Communities felt closer. The old internet gave us mystery, patience and imagination. Today, everything trends, peaks and dies within 48 hours.”

From HT Brunch, October 04, 2025

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