Nostalgia is not what it used to be

For those visiting Cairo, they will get to see a bustling, modern, shiny metropolis whilst traveling on the elevated roads which make up almost the entire city. Venture off these elevated sections of the road and you will be hit hard by a dingier, filthier, congested version of city full of squalid living conditions that makes you rub your eyes to check whether you are in the same city.

Reason I give the Cairo analogy is because last weekend I was on the original Mohammed Ali Road. Around two and a half decades ago, the topography of the original Mohammed Ali Road changed forever after a multi-kilometer elevated road-over-road was built. Being a thoroughbred Mumbaite, I have been pretty much aware of, and frequented the original road - it never was, and hopefully never will be, as bad as the ones I experienced in Cairo. Just that once a speedier alternative was available, there was no reason for me to travel through all the traffic snarls. But last weekend the prospect of saving a tidy sum of money for a project the wife is exploring forced us to abandon the speedier alternative for the snarling one. And I got a chance to veer off into a couple of the many by-lanes that dot the road after almost four decades. Which is when nostalgia hit me like a brick.

These by-lanes were the ones that I had been to quite often as a kid, who for many years harboured dreams of wearing Nike anklet shoes (what are now called high-tops) and doing slam dunks on basketball courts laid in wood. That was the dream. Reality was that I used to hone my skills as a basketball player in anklet canvas shoes by a brand called Power on a red clay court that had been marked out in one corner of Shivaji Park, while all around it were multiple cricket pitches – one of which was being worn down by a certain Sachin Tendulkar who was honing his skills before embarking on his stupendous journey to being proclaimed God of cricket. Unlike Tendulkar, I gave up on my dreams at 18 when faced with a choice of either pursuing basketball and taking up a 9-5 job in some State or Government enterprise, or dreaming up new dreams of a non-sporting career.

But I digress.

Coming back to the by-lanes – like I said, visiting them after close to four decades hit me with a wave of nostalgia. Those by-lanes were home to two of the toughest and best teams of pre-junior and junior level basketball in Mumbai – Mastan YMCA and Nagpada Neighbourhood House. Read this article and you will know why my experiences of playing against those teams on their home ground were not exactly memorable, and why we lost the way we did. The scores of my first two matches there are imprinted in my memory - we lost 64-0 to Mastan YMCA and 122-3 to NNH (yours truly had scored a two pointer from those 3 points). And in spite of not just these two abysmal performances, and many others too where we improved marginally over a couple of years and managed to score in respectable double digits, I found myself irresistibly drawn to revisiting those two courts. It brought back a flood of memories of feeling intimidated by the far superior opponents, intimidated by the obviously partisan crowds that used to gather to watch us play, us being sarcastically applauded every time we managed to just touch the ball for a couple of dribbles, and just generally feeling helpless during the match and hopeless after the match. Traumatic experiences one would rather forget by banishing them to the deepest recesses of the brain, let alone willingly revisit the places of trauma.

Which got me thinking about nostalgia in general.

Turns out that it is a topic of intense psychological analysis and research. Agnes Arnold-Forster in an excellent essay in The Guardian tracing the origins of nostalgia writes,

“Derived from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain), this mysterious disease was a kind of pathological homesickness. It caused lethargy, depression and disturbed sleep. Sufferers also experienced physical symptoms – heart palpitations, open sores, and confusion. For some, the illness proved fatal – its victims refused food and slowly starved to death. As the 20th century dawned, nostalgia loosened its grip on the medical mind, parted ways with homesickness and morphed into, first, a psychological disorder and, then, into the relatively benign emotion we know today. While they no longer considered nostalgia a physical sickness, early psychoanalysts still had little patience for the nostalgics they encountered on their couches. They accused people with nostalgic tendencies of being neurotic and unwilling or unable to face reality. Much like many political commentators today, they were snobbish, arguing that the middle classes were less likely to be nostalgic than “lower-class” or “tradition-bound” people. It wasn’t until the 1970s that these views softened. Today, psychologists believe nostalgia is a near-universal, fundamentally positive emotion – a powerful psychological resource that provides people with a variety of benefits.”

Today, The Oxford English Dictionary definition of nostalgia is: "A sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past." If you notice now, the positive associations with nostalgia are so firmly entrenched, that it never struck me to call my ‘traumatic experiences’ as nostalgia!

With such an origin and evolution story to it, if nostalgia were a person even it would look back on itself with a sense of nostalgia!

What is it that triggers these nostalgic trips into the past? Research points to sensory stimuli as the primary instigators. Sounds, scents, tastes and sights can act as potent memory cues, propelling us into reminiscence. In my case it was the sight of literally taking the road less travelled.

Music too can be a powerful catalyst in this process. Hasn’t it happened to you umpteen number of times that you been taken back in time on listening to even a small strain of a tune in passing? A song from a specific era in our lives can instantly transport us back, rekindling old emotions and memories. This clip from the seminal Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is just such an example of sounds being the trigger:

Flipping through photo albums is one of the most often tapped into triggers to go on a nostalgia trip. Call me old school, but physical photo albums as against digital ones have a stronger impact on taking one down memory lane. Albums are time capsules that can represent not only the times gone by but also an indicator of the distance travelled by the people in the albums.

In my case, books is another trigger that I have consciously developed to take a quick dip into the past. Being a compulsive shopper, books too formed a significant part of my items to buy and own when I didn’t really have any intention of immediately ‘consuming’ them. So I devised a technique to relive the moment of buying the book when I picked it up at a later date to actually read it. I used it every time before the advent of the Kindle and before I started running out of space to buy and store physical books. The technique is quite simple: I note down the day, date, time and the store from which I picked up a book on the first page of the book. This allows me to momentarily revisit the milieu of the store and helps me relive the moment from many days/weeks/months ago, when I pull out the book to actually read it many months or years later.

Trung Phan, a fellow Substacker I subscribe to, recently recounted the time he went on a trip to Disneyland along with his kid. He writes, “Disney has mastered nostalgia. New parents remember their trips to the park as a child, when they asked their parents to go to Disneyland after consuming content from the rest of the Disney empire (film, TV, songs etc.). Those memories catalyze the new parents to let their kids watch Disney stuff and then those children ask to go to Disneyland. The nostalgia flywheel is no joke. But who is Disneyland really for? If novelty is key for forming dense memories as we age, then going to Disneyland actually seems more impactful for adults. While my son enjoyed this trip to Disneyland, I need trips like it to slow down (the perception of) time.”

Nostalgia is also not necessarily always something that is about another era, or about ‘when I was a kid … ’ or ‘in our time … ‘ kind of reminiscing. It can also have an element of recency to it. While a nostalgia trip can happen anytime or can be manifested at will, it seems to be one of the most popular ‘attractions’ in the month of December when the collective humanity reflects on the year gone by. Not only is this type of reflection common, but it can also be good for us. “You dip in nostalgia, you dip into the past,” said Tim Wildschut, professor of psychology at the University of Southampton, “to motivate yourself, to pursue important goals, to imbue life with meaning, to feel connected. And then you go on and life takes over, you know, until the next time.”

The hoarder of memories and experiences that I am, I have taken it one step further where I have collected items off the cabins of my bosses when they were exiting (by requesting them on their last working day), or by demanding or occasionally forcibly picking them up from the desktops of my team members. They help me relive some special times when I just spend that extra moment to gaze at the various items collected over the years.

The lyrics of Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen are a complete thesis on the concept of nostalgia. I would urge you to watch this video with your headphones to avoid missing out on the gems so liberally dispensed through the lyrics.

Ironically, modern life and lifestyles have also changed nostalgia from being an event of chance or inadvertence from the past, to something that one consciously builds up with the future in mind. The memorabilia industry’s very existence is based on propagating nostalgia. Fridge magnets, small collectibles and mementos, local arts and crafts, and in my case local alcohol bottles and coasters all act as potential nostalgia triggers. These are all memories that we buy, to be visited and revisited at a later date because we don’t believe physically revisiting the places since we are busy collecting experiences of newer and newer places all the time.

One of the main reasons why bucket lists may have gained popularity in the recent past is because we plan to experience something in the future so that we can make that our past, to be re-experienced in the future through pictures and memorabilia.

In the same vein, the concept of nostalgia has broken age barriers. No longer is nostalgia about ‘mature’ people who have more memories to cherish of their happy, carefree days. Ioxene Arana writes, “Social media idealization, the before and after marked by the pandemic and the belief that their parents’ lives were better are some of the reasons that drive the new generations to long for the olden days, even if they were not there.”

One of the reasons Roger Ballescà, Vice-Secretary of the Official College of Psychologists in Catalonia, states is the Covid-19 pandemic which caught the youngest people right in the middle of their emotional, intellectual, social and sexual development. He also states that “not only have young people begun to wistfully recall their recent past, they also miss a past they never experienced”. No wonder we often hear our Gen Z daughter say ‘back in our days … ’.

“Faced with climate change, economic upheaval, and the threat of WWIII, [...] nostalgia has been shown to provide a sense of comfort amid uncertainty. However, while millennials are nostalgic for earlier eras they themselves lived through, Zs will latch on to almost any era that offers a reprieve from the heaviness of the now”, states the study that Ballescà has helmed.

No longer does the current generation believe that they are leading a life that is better than their parents did at the same age. From being a ‘reflective’ concept, nostalgia is increasingly becoming a ‘restorative’ concept, in that it tries to restore a golden age.

This has resulted in nostalgia becoming an industry. A few examples:

• With hastags like #y2kaesthetic or simply #nostalgia, social networks are full of low-rise pants, group photos of sneakers forming a star and corduroy tracksuits.

• Spotify’s annual global trend report revealed in 2022 that Gen Z has a particular fondness for the 1980s and sees pop culture memories as a way to relieve their stress - the sheer number of remixes and sampling of tunes from the 80s is proof.

• Eminem, a certified Gen Y youth icon has just been voted the greatest rapper of all time by Gen Z’s, beating Drake no less.

• Gen Z contestants in talent contests often sing golden olden melodies from the Silent or Boomer Gens to showcase their vocal range.

• Nokia feature led flip-phones are seeing a resurgence of sorts among Gen Z’s as they want to experience the joys of (to borrow Gwyneth Paltrow’s famously coined term for her divorce from Chris Martin) ‘conscious uncoupling’ from social media.

• Turntables are one of the most sought after items among millennials and Gen Z’s as they would like to own to experience pure, unadulterated music that is time-bound as against endless streaming over the net.

• Modern designs of gadgets are replete with dials and knobs – things which were replaced by touch pads and digital screens.

• Vintage clothing, aim-and-shoot film cameras are just some more things that are making a comeback.

• Some of the highest selling and most highly priced sneakers today are the Jordans – a rehash of the classic high tops that Michael Jordan popularized.

Which brings me back to my drive through the by-lanes of Mohammed Ali Road.

After the drive-through I decided to make a pit stop at a nearby Bata store to check on the new collection of Power which too is attempting a comeback of sorts. The new designs still left a lot to be desired even today as they did back then. I just felt glad that even all those years ago while playing on the red clay basketball court in a corner of Shivaji Park, and while getting pounded in competitive games with Mastan YMCA and NNH, I was always sure that there would be one thing that I would never, ever feel nostalgic about - those canvas anklet shoes by Power.

Be braver. Be kinder.

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For Keep Watching this time, I am sharing the review of a recent film called Gulmohar. It’s about a family home being sold and how various members of the family have their own bittersweet memories about the place. Thought it was apt for the topic of today’s post.

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When there are multiple cast members across the age and social strata spectrum and multiple plots within plots for each of the cast, you can either get a cliche-riddled khichdi or you can get Gulmohar which keeps blooming layer by layer. A family that’s resided in a bungalow for 34 years is looking at spreading out member by member. How the last 4 days of their stay unfolds the tensions, barriers and issues is beautifully captured without belabouring on any of the individual plots. Considering it’s a family drama, it’s little on theatrics - it’s a hint here, a glance there, a nudge here and a dialogue there. Even the orthodox right wing vs liberal plot line is not jarring. The entire cast is top notch, surprisingly barring Sharmila Tagore and Amol Palekar who are too stiff and come across as superficial. Manoj Bajpayee is a class act. And so is his wife played by Simran. Don’t miss.

Gulmohar | Disney+Hotstar | 2hr 12 min