When the best weapon against every whatnot university thesis about the last millennium is an article about the last decade or so
When the best weapon against every whatnot university thesis about the last millennium is an article about the last decade or so
When someone told me, in a not entirely complimentary fashion, that what I’d written was somewhat ‘nostalgic’, I couldn’t help but catch the implied ‘again’. At first, my hackles soared, that he considered my piece to be nothing short of luxurious, flawless, and life-changing. When I cooled down—which took a minute and a half—I thought she was right, of course. I didn’t even need to go to the archives to see it, for every five pieces I write about Kangna, NRI and Pumex (in various perms and combos) to be seen as a time-better vehicle. could. ,
Heaven, I thought – overnight I had become an old man whose best times were behind him? Who, shuddering, quietly became what he despised more than anything else: sentimental? Part of the assumption was correct to an extent. My obstinate bowels and my abandoned hair-dye kit testify to my antiquity. And, to be honest, I can’t dance singara sarakku With the same action a few years back. But was I past my prime (which was subprime, anyway, at best), and was I wallowing in the bathhouse? That’s when I felt something. I was doing exactly what kind of people I hated: talking about our glorious past.
Whereas WhatsApp scholars who have sensitive parts of our collective are talking of the ‘India’ of brave kings who can single-handedly destroy hordes of ‘foreign’ enemies, where we have learned geometry, astronomy and salsa dancing. Invented, Invented Gravity, Stickers dot And the radioactivity-repellent bull’s horns did it before anyone else, and everything was golden until Aurangzeb, Macaulay and Nehru made it widely available to all, ironically, wasn’t I? How then was I different from these ghostly Glory Boys?
Well, for starters, the past I regularly felt compelled to speak of—while not without its terrifying flaws—was, until recently, something I really lived through, and shared with a generation. who will pledge for it. I didn’t need an ASI to carbon date it, NASA to certify it, or a fake historian to validate it. I was the proof. As was my generation. And when I was talking about better times, I certainly wasn’t talking about the greatest time ever in human history because the first caves uttered the first words spoken by man in Hindi.
How we can live today, see our steady descent Table, and not to mention the recent past? Especially when so many people who have lived and benefited from it – selfish, self-destructive people with low self-esteem, all – are refusing to believe that it ever was?
So, I’m going to forgive myself my nostalgia. I’m fine being an old man. Whenever the fancy catches me, I’m going to write about the past, the recent past, a better past that actually existed because I participated in it. My best weapon against an imaginary past that aims to divide us is a real one, warts and all, that may not unite but certainly will not further divide. I am going to continue mining our past, our collective recent past. For every WhatsApp University thesis about the last millennium, I’ll write a piece about the last decade or so.
Call me sentimental, but our kids will thank me, and other old-timers like me, for the consistent, if minor, role we all played in helping us get through better times. When we finally get there, hopefully.
Krishna Sastri Devulapalli is a satirist. He has written four books and edited one anthology.