Tag: nostalgia

  • leg godt

    Sapphire (toys- retail chain) opened a store in Koramangala recently, and lies on my route to practically anywhere. That means that giant Lego display and I stare at each other almost everyday now.

    Lego and I go back more than a couple of decades. As always, no age jokes, okay? 1984, to be precise. Remember, I wrote about it in ‘The Foreign Object‘? Like I’d mentioned then, the loot from dad’s US stay was rationed out over a long period of time. Perhaps the only part that was exposed completely in the beginning were Lego sets.

    The first set had arrived by a special package even before my Dad or the suitcase reached Indian shores. This was a trailer set, literally, and included a motorcycle too. But the real treasure was the lengthy catalog that came along with it. I quickly set about marking the ones that I wanted and sent it back to Dad.

    Now, I suspect that my Dad, from whom I have inherited my skills, being the kind of shopper for whom a ‘milk and bread’ trip to the local grocery store is a mammoth effort, because of the number of choices that present itself, must’ve extrapolated my interest, seen a huge range of Lego sets, and decided that nothing served as gifts to my cousin set (both sides of the family) better, though the age bracket was anywhere from 2 months to a decade. That meant that when he returned, the suitcase had a disproportionate range of Lego sets, and I wangled, via sulks/sobs/means of affection, the right of first choice, and a cancellation of the original, carefully made, catalog choices .

    In later days, I began to wonder whether it was a choice I might’ve been happy without, because each set had something I really wanted, and despite my arsenal of negotiating tactics, I wasn’t allowed to open the boxes and ‘exchange’ pieces. After various levels of filtering, I finally kept a digger-tipper combo, a medieval catapult, and a medieval castle set. My medieval set soldiers only had swords, shields and spears, and I hated missing out on the one with bows and arrows, but it was all about box sizes and number of pieces.

    Though I was a stickler for not mixing up the pieces in storage, they were allowed to be social and mingle during playtime, and the four sets often gave rise to space crafts which were launched with catapults. (#2 kind of behaviour here) The magnum opus, thanks to a Star Trek/ Space Station Sigma overdose, was a space station, with motorbikes, driven by medieval soldiers, and defended with swords and shields. The tiny spears were also taken to school regularly as part of a superhero costume – they fitted between fingers nicely and could be pushed out using the palm for super-punches. Of course once the punch landed, the spear was pushed back and the palm hurt, so it was discontinued.

    Much later, the Lego sets were passed on to cousins who were more than a decade younger. The stories remained, pushed back, as a life was built. And these days, when I see the Lego display, I am tempted to go in and check out the sets, maybe they have those Star Wars sets here now. Wonder how much they cost now, never had to wonder about that, back in 1984.  The price of growing up.

    until next time, toys are us 🙂

    PS: Lego owes its name’s origin to leg godt, Danish for play well

  • Relative..reality

    For some strange reason, I’ve read Pankaj Mishra’s books in reverse order..well, almost. I read The Romantics first, a long time before, and it remains a book I’m very attached to. Its a good book, but I’ve never figured out the exact reason for this strange bond, in spite of making a rare exception and reading it a second time. Maybe it was the time I first read it (a stage of life) or its characters or its title, someday I hope to know, it will tell me a bit more about myself, perhaps. But meanwhile, from The Romantics, I was lured straight to ‘Temptations of the West‘. A few months later, I read ‘An End to Suffering‘, which served as a kind of introduction to Buddhism for me, as Mishra mapped it on to his own spiritual evolution. I finally completed his first book, ‘Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India’ more recently. Though its title would indicate so, calling it a travelogue would be a gross injustice, as it also manages to recreate the India of the 90’s. So, yes, it is a travelogue, but like many of its ilk, it works in space and time. No, this is not really a review. 🙂

    I’m quite glad that I read his books in the order I did. If I read it earlier, I might have been irritated by the cynicism in the book. But having read his later books, I felt almost as though I was with him, as his thoughts and personality evolved. The book gives you loads of nostalgia triggers – from Baba Sehgal’s ‘Main bhi Madonna’ (i still remember the Magnasound casette cover :D) to mentions of Nonie and Mamta Kulkarni, it draws upon tiny incidents of those forgotten days.

    Many of you may not be able to associate at all with those three people mentioned above, for me, they bring back an era, their importance is relative. I even wondered whether, in future, we will have nostalgia townships, like we have the amusement parks now. The 70s, 80s, 90s re-created in terms of people, music, movies, fashion and all the elements of pop culture that can be attributed to an era. So, when you have those nostalgia pangs, you can call a few friends and take a vacation to bring back a period in your life. 🙂

    A common theme struck me as I ‘moved’ through the book’s pages. Mishra mentions Murshidabad looking towards Calcutta in hope, for job prospects and a better life in general. In many people’s perception, Kolkata is perhaps the worst of the metros on those terms. He writes about the ‘immense cultural vacuum of North india’, and ‘looking towards Bengal for instruction’, and the decline of Allahabad and Benaras. But I realised that for me, those two places were perhaps teeming with culture and history. Again, in Murshidabad, he talks to a person who considers the Babri Masjid as just another mosque, while a nation still burns at regular intervals – the repercussions of an act long ago. The common theme is the relative nature of these things – they means different things to different people, all relative versions of the same thing equally real, when considered from each point of view.

    I remember thinking about progress during my Andaman visit. I saw it in its current state, and can visualise it in the years to come, as tourism becomes a larger factor in the scheme of things, and the changes it will invariably bring in, into a way of life. To quote from the book we’ve been discussing

    Civilisation, however, is on the move, and as E.M.Cioran remarks, nothing more characterises the civilised man than the zeal to impose his discontents on those so far exempt from them.

    When the tourist money flows into the system, it will help the locals afford many things that they perhaps didn’t have access to. But even those who do not wish to change might be sucked into this new way of life because it would be a question of survival. Were they better off and happier before all this happens to them? I don’t know, because after all, even happiness is so relative now.

    Objectivity –  based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices, and not the result of any judgments made by a conscious entity. But everything is relative. Things not seen from one’s own perspective don’t seem to matter, and objectivity’s definition would suggest “no one’s perspective”. Maybe that’s why we don’t care for it much anymore?

    until next time, time, space and relativism

  • Something in common

    A few weeks back, I read a book called ‘Patna Roughcut’. Its one of those nice little books that reminded me of ‘The Wonder Years’, except that this one is non linear even in terms of narrators (not just narrative). While it is set in Patna and Delhi, I could identify a lot of the stuff – something I described in my short review as “you know you were a kid in india in the 80’s ” moments.

    A few days later, I had a conversation with someone on GTalk, about Thums Up and Frooti and all those drinks that existed in the 80’s and 90s, some of which, like Gold Spot and Sprint don’t even exist now, except in our memories. I realised that inspite of the vast distance between us, in terms of geography, we had a few culture icons that transcended it. That includes consumer items like those soft drinks, ads like Surf-Lalitaji, Lijjat Papad, Rasna, serials like Humlog, Mr.Yogi, Buniyaad, books – Amar Chitra Katha and Indrajal and many other things.(if you have been reading this blog post 2005, you might like to read that post, its one that’s very close to my heart)

    I wonder whether there’s an inverse proportion between the maturing of a country/economy and the common memory of generations. I can imagine the earliest generation of our free country, who had a bond – they’d rejoiced on Aug 15th, 1947 and then watched, or sometimes, suffered, the horrors of partition. Later generations who could associate with Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialist monuments (from dams to PSUs), the assassination of Indira Gandhi and where they were when they heard it, the triumph of a cricket world cup, and for us liberalisation and a new economy that changed everything forever.

    And while we have an SRK, a Tendulkar, a Dhoni, perhaps even a Vishwananathan Anand that binds us, in essence we’ve boiled down to Bollywood and Cricket as our icon providers. Everything else pales in comparison, and is at best, a regional influence. A single DD channel doesn’t find a place now even in our favourites, and the same goes for brands across categories. Sometimes I wonder, when the post 2000 generation is all grown up, whether they’ll only be able to relate to those whom they’ve known through some earlier association, like a school or college, and relate only because of those shared memories. Are they missing out on a large collective consciousness, one in which even this generation can relate to someone of their own age, simply because they’ve grown up in the same era? Maybe there are icons that I know nothing of, after all I belong to an earlier set. 🙂

    until next time, nostalgia trips 🙂

  • The Cybernauts

    Was reading a book a few weeks back – The Cybergypsies by Indra Sinha, which was a kind of autobiographical take on the early days of the internet, thats starting around the mid eighties. Its a tale of the early cybernauts, their addiction to the internet and how their real and virtual lives fought each other for attention and threatened to engulf each other.
    It took me back to the turn of the century, my early days online, when the net of Indra Sinha was well on its way to becoming the worldwide web it is today. It reminded me of the a/c internet cafes, visits to which were not so frequent because of the steep costs, and the dimly lit computer labs in the university which had only the unreliable vsnl connection.The days of IRC and chats with unknown angels and merlins and superboys, the arcade games, the imaginary worlds created among friends across geographies, in a way, it was almost the kind of life the early cybernauts led.
    And when you were asked what exactly you spent hours in front of a computer for, you really couldn’t explain what made it so worthwhile. The days of usa.net and eudoramail and theglobe.com, names which have bitten cyberdust quite a whileback. I still have a friend from those days, almost a decade of only virtual friendship, well, almost, since she sent me flowers for my wedding 🙂
    And then came the initial days of blogging, and friends made on rediffblogs, people whom I did not know really, but with whom i shared thoughts, and rants. And, that, i guess where virtuality started ending and reality started taking over. There were blog meets and the imaginary worlds created carefully gave way to the cafes of the real world.
    It took a turn with orkut and co, where the networks were used to get in touch with people you already knew in your real life. And these days, on twitter, i meet a few who i used to know during the rediff days, but gone are the days of anonymity, for my linkedin profile would readily tell people who i was in the real world.
    i miss those days, because there was only communication and a conversation among equals then. No virtual celebrities, no social media experts, no snobs, everything was virtual, your imagination and thoughts were the only thing that mattered, virtuality was a shell you could retreat to when the real world became too unbearable. Its different now, virtuality and reality are too enmeshed, and as with everything else in the world, behind every virtual interaction, there is a real intention. This must be Cybernauts 2.0

    until next time, really virtual

  • Legacies

    Quite sometime back, i had written this, in which i had tried to fathom the confusion of a generation caught in transit. That genaration is definitely making progress, marching towards the paramaters of the next generation with ever increasing confidence, but in a sense, giving up on things that used to be sacrosanct until a few years back. Nothing wrong with that, to each his own. But there’s one thing that always makes me wonder.

    There were things we grew up with – watching potboilers of amitabh in moviehalls with uncomfortable seats and later in VCRs, listening to the nasality of Kumar Sanu on Tseries tapes, enjoying the exploits of Kapil Dev or later Sachin Tendulkar in a crowded room full of cousins, reading Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle and Indrajal, travelling in Ambassador cars and Indian railways, lazing around during summer vacations and so on.
    And while they still watch Big B movies in multiplexes, listen to Himesh on Tseries CDs while pretending to say Oh No’s, Tendulkar still rocks despite occasional calls for retirement, ACK and Tinkle will soon be available online, Indian Railways is still cool if we go by Jab We Met, and they find a few hours to laze around during summer vacations despite the karate classes, entrance tutions, salsa classes etc that enable them to survive and win in this oh-so competitive world, I wonder whether they’ll ever get nostalgic about any of the above the way we do.
    Or have they found other things that i haven’t heard of that will link them with their childhood and youth, the ones that will give them bittersweet memories which they can jot down like this, the legacy of a way of life they can pass on to the generations that follow. Or will it all be forgotten in the tumble of the life we lead today, in which everyday brings in a faster way of doing things, a quicker way of travelling, a better way to store data, an easier way to communicate and so on… Will it all be lost when things become so transient that the past won’t really matter anymore…
    until next time, remember….