Remember the Time…

No wonder our own kiddie memories seem like a foreign country. In a furiously changing India,even 25-year-olds are likely to sound like sentimental fools when they talk of their past. Brands of the time exert a special sorcery. Campa Cola,Gold Spot,“I love you Rasna”,ECE Bulb aur ECE Tube,Cibaca toothpaste,Onida TV,Hamdard ka Cinkara,Vicco Vajradanti,Laxman Sylvania bulbs—those words are portals into a different time. If you felt betrayed when “washing powder Nirma” changed its tune,you know what I’m talking about.

In the last few years in India,many TV networks have aired tributes to those achingly uncool Doordarshan-dominated days. There’s a distinct meme of DD nostalgia on the Web,with grainy clips of Mile Sur,Ek Chidiya,and other old-timey jingles. Obviously,this wistfulness doesn’t mean wanting to go back to the tacky old ’80s—that was then,this is now,and we’re happy to be here. It’s an ironic reminiscence,if anything. We may be sentimental about the artifacts,but few of us care for a rerun of the experience.

Last year,one of Doordarshan’s early benefactors,Maggi Noodles rolled out a great campaign to mark 25 years of its presence here,called “Me and Meri Maggi.” The site was swamped with anecdotes and recipes,as people relived the days when Maggi was a guilty treat,a marvel of instantaneity.

But watching these old commercials online is like trying to create a vanished civilisation from the odds and ends left over. As Salman Rushdie once put it,“shards of memory acquired greater status,greater resonance,because they were remains,fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols”.

Recall how Goodbye Lenin,a bittersweet 2003 film,invoked East German groceries to call up feeling for the charmless GDR. It goes to show you can look back on anything with affection—even the shortage economy,the shabby improvisations,the fashion-backwardness of the socialist republic. Media theorist Svetlana Boym has delved deeper into “ostalgie”: this residual longing for the symbols of a lost past (like Ampelmännchen,the GDR traffic sign,which is now a beloved souvenir). Then there’s Yugo-nostalgia among former Yugoslav republics,heavy with Titoist iconography. A Yugoland theme park flies the old flag and plays 30-year-old music on crackly LPs.

The US has a full-blown remembrance industry,from specialty stores to media experiences to nostalgia conventions. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences lovingly embalms their TV memories. Nick at Nite shows old shows and commercials,or at least used to,with a character called Dr Television doing psycholanalytic readings of shows like Bewitched. There are syndicated rerun shows like When Radio Was. Last year,during the recession,companies like Pepsi and Bumble Bee Foods tried to mine pleasant memories of the ’70s and ’80s with their “throwback” campaigns.

I’m an armchair nostalgic,even about times I have no direct experience of. Faded magazine adverts from the ’70s with funny fonts,the men with their sideburns and women in their paisley-printed saris and hoop earrings,strike me as terribly poignant. The Japanese call it “mono no aware”,this odd,heart-tugging sensation evoked by ephemera. But the best way to tend memories is on the Web,which brings back all these pasts in a perpetual present. On websites like Retrojunk,there are archives from every decade in the US—you can send in your own vivid memories and discuss them with others. Staticofthemind is a site dedicated to radio shows from the golden age of American broadcasting. You can just as easily recollect Indian adverts,news broadcasts and shows on several dedicated blogs.

Of course,it’s a shallow pursuit for most of us,not a meaningful yearning for anything lost. And as literary theorist Fredric Jameson tartly observed,“a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos.”

(amulya.gopalakrishnan@expressindia.com)