In the early 1990s, my relatives in Patna, even those who had no interest in reading or writing, wanted Parker fountain pens.

While I began writing 'Rules of Civility' in 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s, when I happened upon a copy of 'Many Are Called,' the collection of portraits that Walker Evans took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera.

It was only in the early 1990s - during my student years as an aspiring scientist at Delhi University - that I discovered the world of cinema.

Holland was one of the first countries to adopt dance music into their culture, and we were the first ones to have really big raves. I grew up in that atmosphere in the early 1990s, and I was very interested in how dance music was made.

In the early 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a revitalized contemporary Chinese art world that began as a reaction against the government-approved Social Realist style. Zhang Xiaogang, Huang Yong Ping, Ai WeiWei, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi were among the first group of artists to establish a movement that became known as Cynical Realism.

North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.

The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere.

People tend to overlook the fact that North Korea's economy collapsed at about the same time as South Koreans lost faith in their own state. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time when South Koreans were questioning the very legitimacy of their republic.

When I was building robots in the early 1990s, the problems of voice recognition, image understanding, VOIP, even touchscreen technologies - these were robotics problems.

One wrong move that appears to reveal a president ensconced in a White House bubble can lose an election, such as when President George H. W. Bush was criticized for expressing interest in the capabilities of a grocery-store scanner in the early 1990s.