Spend time talking to the older generation in Thoha Khalsa, and you'll quickly notice how often conversations drift toward comparison — not out of nostalgia alone, but because the contrast between then and now is genuinely striking.
Decades ago, the village's lanes were unpaved, dust rising with every passing cart or herd of animals moving through. Homes were built primarily from mud and brick, cool in summer but requiring constant upkeep after every monsoon season. Water was drawn from wells or nearby sources, often requiring a walk that today's residents, accustomed to nearby taps, would find hard to imagine as a daily chore.
Electricity, when it eventually arrived, changed evenings entirely — where once families relied on oil lamps and the natural rhythm of sunset and sunrise, homes could now stay lit, radios could play, and later, televisions would gather entire families and neighbors around a single screen for special programs.
Education has perhaps seen the most visible transformation. Where earlier generations often had limited access to schooling, especially for girls, more recent decades have seen a slow but real expansion — more children attending school longer, more families prioritizing education as a path forward, even as challenges around access to higher education remain, particularly for those wanting to study beyond the village.
Physically, the village has grown outward, with newer construction replacing some of the older mud-brick homes, and roads gradually being paved to connect Thoha Khalsa more easily to nearby towns. Yet certain things persist: the same agricultural rhythms shaping much of daily life, the same sense of community gathering for weddings and funerals alike, and the same mosques serving as anchors of both faith and daily routine.
For those who remember the older version of the village, the changes are often described with a mix of pride and quiet loss — pride in visible progress, but a wistfulness for a simplicity that modernization inevitably reshapes. Preserving the memory of that older Thoha Khalsa, even as the village continues to change, is part of what makes recording these stories worthwhile today.
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