In Loving Memory, On Loving Memory.
Two charming decades, one production house, endless films, and a lot of nostalgia.
Hello!
Welcome to the March Dispatch of Slowly and Enormously. The article you are about to read below is a small bowl of word-salad I assembled. I don’t know if it will be an enjoyable salad, but as salads usually go, I hope it is fresh, peppery, and crunchy.
The night was windy, February had hardly shed the winter off of itself.
The view of the highway from my bedroom window was dotted with vehicles and was abuzz with its usual cokehead energy, courtesy all the truck horns (cue the Dhoom theme track).
Inside my yellow-lamp-aglow semi-cozy room, I was trying to concentrate on a docuseries about Bollywood, as if this were a serious pursuit.
I had slated this series titled, ‘The Romantics,’ on my calendar ever since I’d seen the teaser. I’d planned to gulp it down on Valentine’s night in a binge-coma, after teaching my Tuesday evening class.
And this is exactly what I was doing.
I could barely feel my legs from the day’s weariness, my tongue was now accustomed to the taste of the fortieth pizza-flavoured Pringle I had chomped. But with each new visual and interview excerpt onscreen, I was starting to wake up, into a state of whimsical unrest.
The series was only meant to portray the journey of one film family and its growth into one of India’s biggest production houses- Yash Raj Films. But to me it seemed to convey something much too personal. Two hours in, my mind could not be silenced, for the series had unearthed one too many episodic memories from childhood. Memories of film-watching, scene-reenacting, dancing, singing, running in the backyard with raised hands holding a dupatta in the afternoon while the rest of the household slept. This series mirrored a time of glory and possibility when anything could happen, and quite often, it did.
This night of course, was a mere symbol of what has really been at play for the last couple of years in mainstream culture.
As the WhatsApp chat of my group of girlfriends exploded with live reactions to The Romantics and its eerily relatable mentions of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, it became even more evident to me that I was not alone in experiencing this blast from the past.
Across conversations on lifestyle, culture, ambition, emotion, family and love, I have been observing a rather evident shift, or return. It seems that we are witnessing the birth of a brand, the creation of a parallel culture, one that is slowly (and not subtly) nudging us into 90’s and 2000’s nostalgia. This nostalgia, perhaps, is largely specific to Indian millennials who may have lived through or arrived shortly after the economic liberalisation of 1991.
Whether it is parody-reels titled, ‘Every 90s Bollywood Romance Ever,’ constantly tossed across DMs like a tennis ball, or a retrospective (and nevertheless contemporary) book titled, ‘Desperately Seeking Shahrukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence,’ becoming a bestseller.
It’s hard to erase memories of a time when urban society as a whole traded long walks and newspaper-reading for flocking arcades and training our gastronomic sensibilities to accommodate the distinct stickiness of a pizza.
It seems these decades, the 90s and early 2000s, are coloured in a hint of velvet rose when recalled in imagination.
There is much comfort to be found in nostalgia, in memory.
But what purpose does it serve, I ask myself as I write this.
Might help to go back in time to answer that (#nerd).
The Etymological Route (fave)
Nostos and algos, 18th Century. Two Greek words of which one means to return home, and the other signifies the accompanying pain of not being able to do so.
Nostalgia.
A longing, stretched, ached, and finally captured into an inability to access that which one longs for. Is this to say that we are imprisoned by the present, unable to be anywhere but here?
John Tierney writes in his 2013 New York Times article, ‘What is Nostalgia Good For,’ that research reveals how nostalgia can serve to counteract loneliness, boredom, and anxiety. Drawing from my own understanding of anxiety, both as a subject of study and as a visitor I have befriended, the predictability of nostalgia can allow people to feel a sense of control. They get to predict the ending. This is probably why I’ve seen Derry Girls six times, or why many of us insist on ‘comfort watching’ familiar shows or films when we return to our beds, after a long day of dealing with stressful stimuli outside.
Tierney adds in his article, “On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer.”
Nostalgia allows us to be gentle. To be soft. In our nostalgic stories we are protagonists who have triumphant endings. Even when we remember some of the movies produced by Yash Raj Films in the early 2000s, the films themselves were perhaps not all that great.
But the greatness they instilled in us, for our own narratives, is what remains unmatched over time. They managed to convince us of our invincibility. Whether it was Bunty aur Babli’s tenacious daydreaming, Shruti and Bittoo’s humble rise to reigning Delhi’s wedding planning circuit, or Surinder’s innocent, benevolent love for his wife, Taani.
The protagonists always found their way to a gentle ending.
This is in exact contrast to the usual ruthlessness of our time; in the way we measure our worth, speak to ourselves, and reward/punish ourselves. It’s hard to allow for a tender acceptance of all our versions, when we’re preoccupied with portraying the best one.
There was something softer about those films, something that is long amiss in our lives today.
Could it be that our very ability to be hopeful has been punctured by our acute awareness of reality?
Is it possible for our daydreaming-reminiscing selves to persevere under the all-consuming conditions of our time?
While I let you simmer and marinate in that thought, I will go wrap my head around another one:
We’re old enough now to have our childhood years be converted into memorabilia,
(this is to declare that from now on, Keh Do Na, Keh Do Na, You aaare My Sonia, is a classic).
Hard pill to swallow? Well at least there’s always nostalgia to soften the blow.
Write to me with your thoughts and anecdotes about films in the 1990s and the early 2000s, mostly to reassure me that I didn’t just make up this moment in culture in my head.