I was born late. I earnestly believe I should have been born at least 30 years before I actually came into this world. I wouldn’t even mind being my own mother. Or the mother of a couple of children older than me.
Nostalgia! The fondness with which we reminisce about the days gone by often leads us into believing that nothing can be better than the ‘good old days’.
I remember those family games of Chinese checkers and Scrabble. I also clearly recall how all the neighbourhood children would get together for a game of Gallery every time there was a power cut — which was actually quite often. And the gods forbid if the cut happened after nightfall, because that would mean father asking us to recite multiplication tables!
The day before Deepavali was spent making gujhias together. The day after was even busier. We would collect the wax left over from the errant candles, melt it again and make one big candle. How much time we had!
And then I wonder how we had so much time on our hands. We did not have mobile phones, or even landline phones, except for the occasional “PP” number, if you were lucky.
There were letters to be written and post cards to be posted on every occasion. So, the elaborate ritual of selecting the cards, writing the messages, writing addresses, affixing stamps and posting them was followed.
There weren’t the fully automatic washing machines to wash and rinse, and no driers to dry clothes. Milk was not always delivered at home. Clothes were ironed at home.
There was no concept of private transport except perhaps a Lambretta or Vespa, and the rare, sorely envied Fiat or Ambassador. The Maruti 800 came in the mid-1980s.
That’s when I tell myself this is a sure sign that I am growing old. Doesn’t every generation feel this way? Or, as Woody Allen so brutally put in his 2011 film Midnight in Paris , “Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present.”
The name for this denial is golden age thinking — the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one you are living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.
I try to think objectively. Am I just being an incorrigible romantic? Or an incurable cynic? Much as I try, I fail to recognise much melody in the music that I hear around me; or any humour in the “comedies” I manage to painfully sit through.
I can feel beauty gradually slipping through the world around us. All that remains is the gleam, the glamour, the madness, the rush, the gloss in the world that’s becoming increasingly hollow inside.
I sometimes shudder to think that this is the world my children will grow up in. This is why I think I should have been born decades before I actually was.
shruti.sharma.shk
@gmail.com
