What makes Nostalgia appealing?
A Midnight thought process
I came across the word “nostalgia” on a camera. Vapa had a cybershot digital camera with 12-megapixel lens and 10x optical zoom. I didn’t know it was called optical zoom back then, but to see the lens get longer when I fiddled with a shiny metallic knob was fascinating. The camera had an inbuilt slideshow option, with four modes, one being “Nostalgic”. This particular slideshow added a dash of vignette and played with the saturation of some images, to give a faded, back-in-the-day look, accompanied by rather sombre music. It took me a couple more years since that discovery to understand what the word meant, and a few more years before I could define the word. I could use it in a sentence, but if an examiner asked me to define it for 2 marks (like they did in the exams), I would end up losing those marks.
A few years back, I came across a rather sophisticated iteration of this word, in the form of “Nostalgic Lamentation”. This particular gentleman used this word to define the complaints made by older football aficionados, against a European brand of football that had taken over the South American flair. The idea was that Pele wasn’t going to happen any more, or that Pele would miserably fail (find it difficult would be better) in this UEFA-dominated football space.
The reason I have started this personal exploration of my acquaintance with nostalgia and iterations of nostalgia is my obsession with the past or the stories of the past. More specifically the less glamorous past. The kings, wars and the mighty histories are cool, but the little stories from everyday lives is what gives history its appeal for me. This obsession led me to leave the sciences and take humanities, and to focus on history.
However, the one thing I learned in college was that you don’t need to take humanities to tell stories. You could be a doctor in the emergency room dealing with life and death on an hourly basis, and tell stories with the same appeal. So I decided to let history go and try to work more with people because, in the four years I've spent at university, the most stories I heard were from the fieldwork I did for coursework or otherwise. The academic stories made me realize that the stories are with people. It seems that annals of history pale in comparison with the stories people can tell from their memory. At least, if I didn’t hear enough stories from people, I’d have some stories from the field to reminisce when I eventually break out the rocking chair (figuratively, because a rocking chair is a no for me).
But choosing humanities is rather like the marriage vows you hear in English films (In Malayalam films, you can hear little over the drums and percussion). It’s meant to be forever, and to get out of it, is rather difficult work. Eventually, I guess.
But during this obsession with stories, I have come to a (rather amateurish) conclusion that storytelling is in its dying stages. My academic training has taught to always back up claims with proof, so my claim is based on the fact that I’ve seen these posters that help people master the art of storytelling, or about groups that you can join to tell and hear stories. If there is some indication that a practice is dying, the “art-ification” of this is a rather strong indication.
We having to teach something, or to learn something, to do something by blocking times in our Google calendar, rather feels like an attempt to revive or keep something going. It’s because it’s no longer happening organically. All these workshops, and support groups, seem to detach a practice from its natural surroundings, making it specific, time-bound and reproducible. I’d rather a practice die than ostensibly attempt to keep it alive.
This is, however, by no means a novel discovery. We are inundated every day with streams of pictures, life updates, voice notes, to the point that it seems like we don’t have anything left to tell, or that we don’t have the time to tell anything. This is a two-pronged exchange, stuck in a loop. It seems people are ready to share, and in turn, expect your life to be shared and vice-versa. This is true in your work and at your home. Personally, it doesn’t matter if I come home one week later, or a month later from college, Umma knows whatever is happening in my life. She knows if I’ve been sick, if I am low on attendance if I’ve gone to the mountains or so. She doesn’t demand every one of this information, but she expects it to a small degree, the rest I provide, because why not?
It’s not a bad thing. Hand to my heart, I am rather relieved that this works the other way as well. I know the moment she needs help, and I can at times relive her boredom with stories from across the border. It’s stories nonetheless, but perhaps the hopeless romantic in me would prefer a “homecoming” where Umma is amazed at the volume of hair on my head or hasn’t seen the picture of the time I rode to a hill station with a person from work.
This leads the storyteller in me to believe that times were better back then because there would be a novelty to the stories we share. Not just the stories, the romantic in me believes that times were simpler. You could do your thing and be done with it. We had more chances to be Kaleb Cooper than we have today. The occasional person in the village who got out, to a market town in British India, or to Colombo or the Persian Gulf would have stories from another world. The person from Bangalore now, maybe not. These stories from Thrichinaplli, or the Colombo are worthy enough to be told for at least a couple of generations, merely because it has something you’ll never see on the gram today. There are stories that even the ethnographer with a PhD might not have.
And it gets better with time. A good storyteller would perhaps have a flair to lace it with some awe, or even the bad storyteller might be able to invoke curiosity regarding the missing pieces, or the inconsistencies in the timeline of his narration. I think these stories encourage conversations, around the dinner table, in the car (or the bus, because weren't that common back then) or on a random Friday night.
In addition, there would ideally be fewer things to worry about. We didn’t have to justify why some madman who you don’t know did a certain thing. Imagine being a Muslim and not having to constantly denounce 9/11, or to cite multiple fatwas that denounce what someone did in a place you didn’t even know existed. Say this to a practising Muslim, and see how his face lights up.
But this strain of thought is swiftly interrupted by the academic training I received on the basis of the academic training I got based on stories that did make it into the ethnographer’s PhD thesis. Imagine being from the lower strata of society. Things being simple also means that social mobility wasn’t something you could even consider. I think I would rake the reels and the overstimulation of today if it came with the surety of better and dignified living. The novelty of the stories from the above-mentioned places also means that migration is near impossible. I personally know deep in my heart that I will eventually leave the place I was born and raised in.
But this potentially astute observation of the realities of the past, the same ones that make me a developmental optimist, is no match for the idyllic tenants of my thought process. I cannot but fall in love with a dimly lit house with no computers or gadgets, where silence falls by ten in the night, and sleep hits the moment you get in contact with your not-so-comfortable bed, or even a cot for that matter.
Now that sleep has come into this conversation of Nostalgia, I think my obsession with the past is also because everything I want to change about myself, wouldn’t have been an issue ten years back. Hence my obsession with the past seems to stem from an aspiration for the future. This includes an absence of scrolling, more clicking than tapping, and a general lack of interruptions in life. Now, you might be of the opinion that it is my problem. I could just exchange my smartphone for a brick phone, get done with my social media accounts, use one of them scroll blocks, or so on.
The thing, is human contact has now evolved (rather backwards) to be over these kinds of devices. Interview schedules come on WhatsApp, the kind of companies I might get employed in post job openings on the gram (Let’s not start with LinkedIn), & even payments are made by tapping the screen. These are not necessarily bad things, but when someone is borderline addicted and is trying to reduce use, the world doesn’t really allow it to happen. Imagine trying to cut down on alcohol, and finding a job, but how easy is that going to be if jobs are posted on a notice board hidden in a bar? Or living in a world where more often than not, your salary is dispensed through a bar in the locality. Who wouldn’t want a drink on payday? And who’s keeping count after the first drink?
Dear Reader, If you’ve made it till here, I think there is something you like about this post. A lot of mental effort goes into writing this post. I wouldn’t get on a high horse and say this is solely for you, because this is for me, as much as it is for the readers. But this takes efforts, and if you find this interesting, consider engaging with the post. Subscribe, share, comment. I originally wanted to built a community of readers and writes, so the more you engage, the closer we are there. If there is something you would like me to write about, share those as well. I’ll try and make those happen as well. Despite everything, I still have an Instagram handle here