When someone said to me, in a not entirely complimentary fashion, that the piece I’d written was somewhat ‘nostalgic’, I couldn’t help but catch the implied ‘yet again’. At first, my hackles went up, that she didn’t consider my piece anything but brilliant, flawless and life-changing. When I cooled down – which took a minute and a half – I figured she was right, of course. I didn’t need to go over the archives to see that, for every five pieces I write about Kangana, NRIs and Poomex (in various perms and combs) there is one that could be seen as a when-times-were-better vehicle.
Heavens, I wondered – overnight had I become an old man whose best times were behind him? Who, shudder, had quietly become what he despised more than anything else: sentimental? Part one of the assumption was true to an extent. My recalcitrant bowels and my abandoned hair-dye kit stand testimony to my ancientness. And, to be truthful, I can’t dance to Singara Sarakku with the same verve of a few years ago. But was I past my prime (which was subprime, at best, anyway), and was I wallowing in bathos? That’s when something hit me. I was doing the exact same thing the kind of people I detest were: talking about our glorious past.
While the WhatsApp scholars who have our collective sensitive parts in a stranglehold are talking of an ‘India’ of valiant kings who could destroy hordes of ‘foreign’ enemies single-handedly, where we invented geometry, astronomy and salsa dancing, discovered gravity, sticker bindis and radioactivity-repelling bull horns before anyone else did, and all was golden till Aurangazeb, Macaulay and Nehru mucked it up comprehensively for everyone, ironically, so was I, no? How was I any different then from these past-obsessed glory boys?
