Nostalgia – Now available in limited edition at select stores

Time of India

14-07-2025

The idea for this article began, as many important quests do, with a VHS tape. I had found it while I was clearing out my old almirah. The tape labelled 'Hyderabad Trip and Quiz Broadcast' (in my mother's handwriting of course) was broken at one corner and gave off that peculiar smell of ageing plastic and unwinding magnetic tape. Naturally, I wanted it fixed.
What followed was a month-long wild goose chase through the narrow gullies of Chandni Chowk and Daryaganj. The man who used to fix our VCR – a mercurial genius named 'Rosy' who smoked Wills Gold and cursed MTV for 'corrupting the youth' – had long since disappeared. I then scoured Lajpat Nagar, Karol Bagh, and even shady establishments in Nehru Place. But none could guarantee that they could repair the tape.
But by then, the tape had already done its work. I did not need to watch it, because I could remember everything, quite vividly. The jerky zooms, the grainy texture, sitting near Hussain Sagar Lake, answering a streak of tough quiz questions on national television. All the memories came flooding back, not in a single file, but in a battalion. It was, truly, a resplendent afternoon.
But at the back of my mind, I felt a strange unease, a sneaky feeling that I was being manipulated by my own past. Or worse, by a curated version of it, which I was viewing through rose-tinted glasses. This led me to reflect upon the position that nostalgia holds in modern Indian life.
It would be easy to dismiss all this rumination as overthinking. After all, isn't nostalgia supposed to be comforting? A warm bath for the soul, mildly tinged with melancholy but ultimately safe? Here, we must differentiate between two kinds of nostalgia: the nostalgia of remembering and the nostalgia of performance.
True nostalgia, the nostalgia of remembering, is messy and it remembers not only the sweetness of the mango, but also the stringy bits stuck in your teeth. It includes the restlessness during power cuts, the needlessly corporal school punishments, and the sweet heartbreaks that now seem embarrassingly small but once loomed larger than life. It is not always pleasant, but it is still an integral part of us. It is after all our lived experience – an indelible memory that courses through our veins.
However, what we are seeing nowadays is not nostalgia, but its performance, a commodified imposter that has been hollowed out and glossed over for mass appeal. And this demands an interrogation.
Scroll through Instagram, and there it is: montages of '90s and '00s Indi-Pop music videos, lo-fi versions of Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, reels of Phantom Sweet Cigarettes, and old clippings of radio jockeys like Ayushmann Khurrana on Channel V. That stark Doordarshan logo, rotating like the Konark Wheel on an old Onida CRT screen, now appears on overpriced UNIQLO T-shirts. The irony is rich. The same generation that once rolled its eyes at DD's painfully slow newsreaders and monotones is now buying merchandise to celebrate it. It is like romanticising boarding school once you are safely out of range of its discipline.
This imitation of the past, what one might call 'simulacral memory' (if one were paid by the syllable), does not invite reflection but encourages regression. It is not merely longing for the past, but longing for a past without difficulty. In allowing only the sugar, we are denying the salt, leading to a case of cognitive hyperglycemia.
Why is this happening now? Partly because the past feels anchored and familiar compared to a dissatisfying present and an uncertain future. But the more we pine for the past, the more we flatten it and risk turning memory into a Pinterest moodboard.
Another aspect is the institutionalization of nostalgia. It has been packaged into products for mass consumption. Your old Nataraj pencil now comes in a vintage collector's box. Shaktimaan action figures abound in stores. Even the palate has not been spared. There's a new gourmet startup selling 'maa ke haath ka achaar'. I tasted one, and it had more preservatives than love.
This kind of nostalgia has a very specific consumer in mind – the middle to upper-middle-class urban Indian – who came of age in the post-liberalisation era. Theirs is usually a life of parts – pining for the (supposed) innocence of the past while struggling with the pangs of urban loneliness. They want to remember what their childhood felt like, without remembering what it cost. It is a kind of historical cosplay.
Perhaps, the issue is not even the people, or nostalgia's corporatisation. It is the act of nostalgia itself. In small doses, it cures the fever of wistfulness, but we seem to have overdone it and made the present feel counterfeit. Well, here is the truth: the good old days weren't all that good. They were rife with their own problems, which we conveniently forget due to the tyranny of distance.
The irony, of course, is that even my own recollections fall into this trap. When I walk past the park near my home, I remember cricket matches played with tennis balls. What I forget, conveniently, is how often those matches ended in minor fights, or in being told off by someone's angry parents.
As for that VHS tape, I never could get it fixed. But I could not bring myself to throw it away either. So, today, it sits on my desk as an artefact of a different time. Some evenings I pick it up, run a thumb over the label, and let the images play out in my head sans filters, captions, or likes. This allows me to let nostalgia be what it once was, a personal murmur and not a product. Because memory, in its purest form, is not a brand but a silent bruise that we are wont to carry throughout our lives.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.