Those good old days

Nostalgia is fine as long as we don’t believe everything our romanticised memories seem to tell us.

May 14, 2011 06:44 pm | Updated 06:44 pm IST

Old enough to get nostalgic... Photo: K.R. Deepak

Old enough to get nostalgic... Photo: K.R. Deepak

Not very long ago, I overheard an interesting conversation at a school reunion. One of the protagonists was lamenting to a friend that the school seemed to have gone to the dogs and things seemed to be far from the way it used to be in ‘our days’. They then reminisced about the ‘good old days’ and the fun they had and what a wonderful place the school used to be.

Just 20 years old

A pretty commonplace conversation, one would imagine. For all practical purposes; yes, save for the fact that the two conversationalists were all of 20 years of age and had probably graduated from school just a couple of years before the reported conversation took place. Soon, an older person joined the conversation and went on to tell the two 20-year-olds that they had no right to talk about the good old days. The thrust of the argument was that since it had only been two years since they’d passed out of school, they were still part of the ‘bad new days’.

Soon a lot of people joined in and the conversation got pretty animated with everyone insisting on buttonholing the two hapless youngsters and giving them a lot of gyan about how good the old days really were and how unlucky they were not to have lived through them. The two youngsters made hasty exits as soon as was decently possible. So apparently, one doesn’t have to reach dotage to experience nostalgia. Even 20-year-olds can. But older people sometimes have a tendency to lay exclusive claims to nostalgia.

So, what’s the deal with nostalgia? Were the old days really that good? Are the new days really that bad? Does it serve a purpose or is it just part of the bellyaching that we’re all so good at? The way I see it: everyone has a right to nostalgic reminiscences. A couple celebrating their first wedding anniversary is likely to get as nostalgic about the day they got married as a couple celebrating their silver wedding anniversary. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything that happened after the good old wedding day has been necessarily bad, does it?

It’s not uncommon to see nostalgia being expressed as a lament, rather than as fond reminiscences. Which brings one to the question, were the old days really that good? The typical lament is that things were much easier in ‘those’ days. Life was much easier. There was hardly any traffic. No pollution. People were nicer and kinder to one another. There was no ‘road rage’. Friends met and talked to each other face to face, not through a bunch of computers and mobile phones. There were more trees, more forests, and abundant water for everyone. People played with real toys. They played real games. Cricketers played for the love of the game and not for ‘filthy lucre’. Politicians got into politics to serve the country and its people. And so on.

But when it’s pointed out to them that there were fewer job and career opportunities in those days; that it took several days to complete a journey that takes just a few hours today; that despite the traffic, people are able to commute long distances; that the Internet has increased connectivity between people and has made life more convenient, despite its shortcomings; that you don’t even need to make a trip to the bank to transfer money; that cricketers come from smaller towns today and still play high quality cricket, they are still not convinced, for, their focus is almost exclusively on the less prepossessing aspects of modern life.

Highly personal experience

Despite the tendency to facilitate lamentation, Nostalgia is a very valid psychological experience since it serves to periodically recharge one’s energies in order to face the challenges of modern life. Nostalgia is a highly personal experience of selective recall of romanticised memories, all highly exaggerated by the passage of time. These memories bring forth a highly positive emotion in all of us - at some time or other that - we enjoy and celebrate. This positive emotion gives us a feeling of well-being and the wherewithal to get on with our lives. Nostalgia can only be detrimental when we find that we spend more than a fair share of our waking life soaking ourselves in nostalgic reverie, if the life that we are currently leading is not stimulating enough for our needs. However, even if this were our situation, it’s quite likely that a few years from now we will be nostalgic about how nostalgic we were at this time of our lives.

But we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be carried away and believe everything our romanticised memories tell us. For, often, they are quite inaccurate (even for those of us who pride ourselves on the infallibility of our memories). However it is undisputable that nostalgic reminiscences can be fun, refreshing and stimulating, as long as we learn to enjoy them and understand their place in our lives. The old days were not all that good. And the new days are not all that bad.

E-mail the writer at vijay.nagaswami@gmail.com

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