NOSTALGIA

Here is the essay I referred to in my post from yesterday. I wrote it approximately in 1984 (or, it could have been 1985) I just discovered my handwritten version of this that actually dated it to February 1987. I was approximately 18 20 when I wrote this. I found the typewritten sheets in an old box and decided to transcribe it to digital form. I was tempted to make some corrections to grammar, word usage, and punctuation, but I resisted. This is using the exact same words and form as the original.

Original typed manuscript from the 1980s

NOSTALGIA

Is this why I have rushed through all these years of my life? To reminisce about the past? I never took a moment more than 52 weeks to complete each year of my life, as if in a hurry to shake the years off as a swan shakes drops of water off its feathers. But now I feel myself being drawn back into youth. The mysterious haze beckoning, taunting. And I try desperately, rubbing my eyes, to get a clearer picture of my past. I see a hazy vision of myself energetically cranking my HMV gramophone, eager to hear how Elvis sounds on his latest release. A blue cloud lifts to show me a boy skipping school to stand outside the airport and gaze awestruck at those magnificent flying machines.

And I look at myself. Or is it really me? How much I have changed. How bravely I had faced the world then. The exuberance of youth now gone forever. Nostalgia never leaves us. In my childhood I spent hours on end with sanguine thoughts of my utopian future. Thinking … about the cars I would have… The day I would actually travel in an airplane… my own family… When was the switchover? At what stage did my day dreams of the future become day dreams of the past? I long to pinpoint the stage at which the suffix “Uncle” was added to my first name. Or to put it bluntly, the stage at which I became “legitimately old.” Perhaps it was gradual. Maybe at some point, I spent equal amounts of time thinking of my past and my future. I can’t recall now. But I can, now, think of some indications of this change. The day I actually felt a sting of satisfaction when I met a long lost classmate of mine and found that he had lost more hair than I.

The blue cloud descends and the scene is lost. I try and look further back. My eyes trying to push away the fog and pull the past a little closer to me for a clearer view. I hardly notice the clearings which reveal the not so pleasant memories. My first broken leg. The first ‘F’ on my report card. The death of my pet cat… I wonder… am I pulling the past closer to me… to prevent the exchange of a certain past with an uncertain future? The human reflex to clutch on to familiarity and shun risk, personal risk.

Today, with my white, thinning hair and wrinkled face, I find it impossible to be hopeful about the future. I spend hours looking back with nostalgia but the future is always looked upon with awe – and sometimes – dread. Why do we humans assume death to be something terrible? Is it because it is in the future? Something we have never experienced? Something we know nothing about? Then why is it that a youth looks upon that same future with hope and with a cheerful face while I look upon it as inevitable and try so very hard to accept it?

At a certain age the dread and awe are replaced with the “brave” smile of reconciliation. I seem to take pride in the fact that I am closer to “the end” than you are. “See how brave and cheerful I am” I call out quietly to everyone I meet. The superiority I feel is reflected in the pat on the back I give to the young I meet. Every action of mine in their presence seems to tell them “you’ll get here soon. Let’s see how brave you are then.” “I am brave” I assure myself. The fact that I need to reconcile myself to my fate implies that the end is something undesirable. The eighteen year old boy who just walked across the street doesn’t seem to be struggling to accept the inevitable confrontation with his uncertain future. Perhaps this is the wisdom that comes with age. Perhaps it is my wisdom that convinces me that I need to resign myself to the “terrible end” that it reaching out for me. The black hand stretching out to squeeze the breath out of my body. If wisdom means nothing more than an awareness of the mortality of man, I want no part of it. How lucky fools are!

But I worry. My wisdom incessantly reminds me of my glowing past and dim future. Nostalgia overcomes me. I know. Every single day I spend moving towards my bleak future obscures, erases totally one day of my glorious past. A day I can never look back on. The mist thickens. One more day of my life is lost.

**           **           **

RAJIV VAIDYANATHAN

Address:   C – 6/57, S.D.A

                 New Delhi – 110 016

[Written circa 1984 February 1987]

Back to Blog

I predict that this blog is going to go through a sudden burst of activity. At least for this burst, the posts on this blog will shift from random thoughts to a focused stream. It will remain consistent with the overriding theme of my doing this for me and me alone. But now, this blog will also serve as an online "cloud" repository of historical documents and writings that are important to me personally.

Looking through the box, bald spot and all!

What triggered this? Going through an old box of stuff from my youth. In this box, I found a variety of things that drowned me in nostalgia. Several of the items relate to my great-grand-parents (e.g., biographies from magazines) and I felt that some of this deserved to be accessible online for anyone to access - though it will probably be primarily of interest to our vast family. As far as I know, none of this material is available online anywhere else.

I also read an article in the paper today about research showing that Google is changing the way our brains work (Science, 2011). We tend to allocate our information processing capacity towards things that are important and relevant to us. As Google makes a vast trove of information easily accessible so that we don't have to actually remember all this stuff any more, our brains are diverting their cognitive capacities towards other things - like where stuff is stored (as opposed to WHAT that stuff is).It's true. All the materials I found in this box brought back a flood of memories and I wondered why this information wasn't more easily accessible. I would like to offload some of my memories to the online world so it can be easily accessed by myself and my friends and family in the hope it will keep these bonds through time rather than just when I stumble upon an old box of knick knacks.

Already, Facebook has enabled me to connect with several of the people dusted off from within the box I opened yesterday. What a world! Coincidentally, I watched the movie "Social Network" this weekend. I really believe now that social networking sites like Facebook (or whatever other incarnation happens to dominate in the next decade) are stunning achievements in their ability to connect people not just across space, but across time. Sure, enough has been written about the problems with sites like Facebook, but on days like this, I just marvel at its ability to connect people over the years. I found one person from my past and found he was connected to just one or two other people. Each of those people had connections with just one or two other people from my youth. Within a few hours, I had connected with people from my school, college, and acting group based in different continents.

Then, there is my own stuff. I used to love to write and I found notebooks and typed pages of stuff I wrote in the early eighties. Now, that by itself is not so interesting. What stunned me is that some of those brief essays are astonishingly well written even with my jaded professor's eyes of today. Truly, I am quite stunned at what I wrote when I was 18 years old. Surprisingly, some of the content still seems contemporary and appropriate even today. For example, I found this short essay I wrote called "Nostalgia" which is written from the perspective of an old man looking back at his past and his youth. Now, what could an 18-year-old possibly know about old age and nostalgia? At the "ripe old age" of 44, I am reading this and still can't find much fault with the perspective. And, it seems so well written. I remember writing it, but can't emotionally connect with the person I was when I wrote this. It just seems to be better written than anything I could come up with today. What happened to me?

So, that should prepare you for what is to come on this blog over the next few days/weeks. A documentation of my past, essentially. You'll hear and see from my grand parents, great grand parents, and even the young me. I'll refer to friends and associates (please drop me a note to have any references/links/images redacted) and hopefully build a searchable online repository of my personal history.

So, let's start, quite appropriately, with an essay I wrote (most likely in 1984 or 1985 at the age of 17 or 18) called "Nostalgia." Wait for it tomorrow ...