#Scurf117: I love rains, memories and chai but I'm still against nostalgia
On various things considered pristine just because they are in the past
Hi friends. I am going to try to write this newsletter more regularly and do some things where each month I write interconnected pieces that tie in which each other loosely. Largely informal, these will make the essays kind of gathered around particular themes from that moment in time, or not. They will still be all in keeping with the granular idea behind this newsletter — all of them will essentially be works in progress. I will continue to play around with germs of ideas, themes and radical notions and push them out of my outbox each week to see what gathers moss in your reading. These essays will be weekly, if not more frequent. When in the week I don’t know, how long or short I don’t want to know, but mostly bursting with ideas that are out of left field.
In this dispatch I write about a minor quibble with the prevalent mode of thinking about people with money, and we quite pointlessly love dwelling on the past, and its muggy, mucky memories. Read on!
A few days ago I saw all my social media connections share and re-share a post about nostalgia. It was an accumulation of pretty, well-meaning words appreciating bygone times when people sat together to watch torturous television with limited options, or ate vada pav or bad dosas for the lack of better options. Around the same time I read HT’s columnist Monika Halan write about how “India needs to discard its old poverty narrative and embrace wanting to be rich. The underlying reality of lives has changed, but the discourse still puts a high moral value to poverty.”
Both the posts went rogue, painting all of social media red in their wake. While one praised the times of the yore, when we lacked and didn’t have any of what we do now, the other tackled it differently. Halan’s article focused on how we, as Indians, need to move past those dire, dog days of socialism and accept the “concept” of a rich Indian. “A nation emerging out of generations of poverty and a socialist political mind-set needs a change in narrative. “I want to be rich” should not be shamefully imagined but be owned and aspired for,” she writes.
The other SM post, that I will not share a direct link to, reminisced albeit very differently and sweetly about how we scoured through TV channel listings on newspapers to decipher what we’ll watch each night on cable TV. It said, “you couldn’t control what you could watch—you were at the mercy of a pre-decided menu rather than a buffet.” By harping on what once was, it created a micro bubble, stilling time in its wake and making one even if involuntarily remember those times fondly.
My grouse with that is not that the choices we have nowadays are generally all welcome, but the fact that having those choices refers directly to the decades of progress and hard work that we put in as a nation. We the 1991 liberalisation kids of India are no longer just that — kids. We’re grown adults who need to understand the hard work and deficit our parents had to live through, to make it possible for us to see the days we’re seeing now. We need to rightfully accept and own, as Halan says the narrative of getting rich, generating jobs and making India a not poor nation. Instead what we do is lazy nostalgic reminiscing, rehashing old ideas, talking about the earlier times as if they were a resource of joy and fulfilment.
As of 2022 in terms of various economic aspects the progress made in India feels permanent and irreversible. And reminiscing fondly about days of the yore when one had limited options and had to entirely bank upon “serendipity” to find something new is slightly off kilter and borders on falling in the packet of poverty, or even ruin, porn.
The post gives various other examples of how curation in our current hyper-digital age in India is not all that necessary. It seems to suggest that we could all be still buying second hand books from the “raddhiwala”, or relying on poorly paid RJs to take our calls and play the “next Boyzone song”. It’s almost as if the writer refuses to interact with the social and economic realities of these functions. Do we know how much a raddhiwala made monthly in the early 90s and how much he does today? Do we ever question how and why raddhiwaalas and waalis still exist? It’s as if the writer is wilfully going against the grain of what the present time puts on offer for us and how that makes life so much more tolerable.
This viral Twitter thread extrapolates on the hardness of life in India just about a couple of decades ago:
“We curate endlessly, right from our streaming platforms to our bookshelves…. which means that there is little chance for us to experience something that we never experienced before,” the post goes on. This post along with many similar others that culturally reminisce fondly about before times, about the “dilapidated but pretty” buildings of Calcutta, about hand-pulled carts in our cities, do the work of bringing us a whole lot of dramatic visuals, words that seem to spark a batch of memories but offer zero perspective.
They also do the job of being thoroughly entertaining reminding me of the innate beauty that lies in personal writing. In evoking the stale batch of recollections, it is able to translate deeply recognisable facets of our lives as Indian kids growing up in various parts of the country. It speaks to the state of our so called human condition, across the axes of time, space, identity, and life experience. But does it bring us out of it? Give a perspective on the present? Identify how these things have changed for the better — increasing employment, giving us a plethora of options in a limited sum, opened gates for cultural exchange? I guess hardly so.
“Good personal writing,” as Rachel Connolly describes in her essay The “Pity Me!” Personal Essay, “can create this strong sense of kinship with a stranger.” Connolly talks about a few examples of essays (though the writing I refer to here is merely a post) which merely scratch at the surface of a particular topic. She writes, “On finishing (the essay) I had the feeling that some deep truth had been articulated for me.” This rings true for the post too, which works to attends to our basest, very simplistic curiosities. All of us spending time loafing on social media already know and are almost looking for such nostalgia-addled posts. It’s a well travelled, weighted and frayed device in other places too. We love Cred ads precisely because they do the same thing — scratch at our curiosities hardly enough to bring our attentions to the a product (the Karishma Kapoor ad, etc.). But beyond that it’s zilch — a garden variety of entertainment that is entertainment clothed as thought provoking.
This is a kind of banal, surface level social media friendly writing that first picked up base with reminiscing about trashy Hindi films (a few years ago first on Twitter then on Instagram) too. And they are all the same — excessively saccharine and quite frankly, very useless. Halan’s writing on the other hand opens floodgates of anecdotal reminiscing that actually do the work of helping us understand how far we have come.
The replies to this tweet explain the myriad ways in which people suffered at the time — due to sheer lack. As a nation that continues to grapple with various paucities (of healthcare, of social equality, of economic opportunities), SM posts glorifying times of lack of power, water, come across as a little off-handed, irresponsible and out of touch.
What Halan is writing about is the state of affairs in Delhi where things were far better than where I was born and brought up — 410 kilometres away in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Those three words are still weighted as the state is yet to see the light of the day (in so many ways). When I was growing up in the early nineties Kanpur was an erstwhile industrial town where everything reached us a few years late. During summers every morning as I walked or took a tin-covered rickshaw to school, the sight that greeted me first was that of cattle grazing the grass outside, pigs rolling in filth and stray dogs chasing after everyone. There were (and still are no) no roads, infrastructure, telephone and water. Power was an afterthought through the year, and although I didn’t have to study in the street light, kerosene lamps and candles dully lit up our house. And this is when both my parents worked and we were reasonably middle-class. Against this backdrop, the set of memories described in the post (and liked by more than 4,000) are the opposite of fond. They are, in fact, triggering, irksome and border on fetishistic.
In her editorial Halan writes, “Post 1991, and especially after the turn of the millennium, signs of a better life are unmistakable – whether it is cars stuffed into the narrow lanes of a Delhi Development Authority colony or air conditioners and washing machines being bought by domestic helps.” In this light nostalgia if not dealt with carefully creates false memories and portraits of “the good old times” when reality was markedly different. Socialist, leftist propaganda injected into anything from a couple of decades ago can easily stir up a nostalgic frenzy. More so with the perfect balance of crowd appreciation and an adequate whip of language. The thousands of likes on the post make me wonder if we woke, online, employed Indians of 2022 want nothing to do with making economic progress an Indian.
The worlds between what is described in the said post and the world we live in are divided by various liberalisation, economic progress, a gradually receding pandemic, polio eradication, rise and rise of casteism, racism, and and fascism. Then it makes me wonder if those times were really all that good. One would assume that life in India toughens its people against sentimentality by allowing a more real, upfront experience of a variety of ways of life. Instead we allow Orientalism to get the better of us, and are easily swayed by the winds of easy, cheap commodification of times past, that doesn’t even yield a satisfactory feeling.
I am now trying to get a bit more regular here (and not jinx it by typing these words). It would be lovely if you’d share this newsletter with your friends, cousins, acquaintances, even parents. Anyone who reads for leisure will find something of their liking in my list of scurf posts so far. There are not just essays they are deflections, fragments, and entanglements where I try to thread a needle, one topic at a time. These are mostly just for me. But through these acutely personal musings, I am also trying to find meaning for you. These posts are wayward, and sometimes also make me feel exposed. But mostly they are me in parenthesis, digressions where I try to piece myself together for me, before you. Sometimes they are longer than those long nights, at others, shorter than a sigh. I do feel shy and uncomfortable at the thought of sending some of these out, and maybe will put those weirder ones behind a paywall soon too, but till then all of them are free and I hope you enjoy sharing and reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.
See you soon again!