Column

Nostalgia is almost always overrated and one never realises it till one experiences it oneself. In a sense, nostalgia is nostalgia precisely because it is overrated. I used to eat at a small chaat place across from the school I studied in several years ago and because my parents didn’t believe in the concept of pocket money (“why do you need pocket money when you can tell us what you want it for and we will give it to you”) and you know how that works. I could never ask them to give me their hard-earned money so I could eat ‘Bombay bhelpuri’ instead of the cornerstone of a healthy South Indian lunch, curd-rice at home. So I used to save up small amounts and once in a while taste that bit of heaven that was ‘Bombay bhelpuri’ at the ‘Bombay Halva House’ in Mylapore, Chennai.

It was utterly delightful. I remember spending several youthful days dreaming about how I would grow up, get a job, buy a house, hire a cook and have them make Bombay bhelpuri for me for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The freshness of the sev, the perfect tanginess of the sauces, and the bite of the spice were etched in my mind when I recently stepped into the place to relive the past.

And the ‘Bombay bhelpuri’ there was just dreadful. It was beyond bad. It had taken a long-term resident visa into the United States of Badness and had now applied for a green card there. It was overly sweet, the sev was stale, and the mint felt like the plant was from around the time I had originally enjoyed the bhelpuri.

And yet, I saw a few kids in the uniform of my alma mater enjoying ‘Bombay bhelpuri’ and then realised that the bhelpuri had never got worse. My tastes had changed. I had had enough great bhelpuri over the years to be able to distinguish between good and bad bhelpuri, and I suspect this is likely true for most nostalgia. Had I never bothered to visit that place again, I would still continue raving about it to anyone willing to hear.

It works the same with pretty much any other kind of nostalgia, music, art and the zeitgeist of the times themselves. When old people tell me that life was better in the past, I itch to tell them that no, it wasn’t. People lived shorter lives and knew far less because there was no internet, but I don’t do that. I let them rave about the Bombay bhelpuri of their times because, unlike me, I can’t take them to the joint today and make them experience the fallacy of their nostalgia.

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