Nostalgia by Ashish Gaur
Nostalgia is a bittersweet muse. Nostalgics are storytellers of the past, as they dwell in an era gone by.
Desolate hanker (desire) back tracking frugal episodes to their lives and this conundrum is endless.
Endless materialistic leaps stumbled mumbled when covid barged in. Ramanand Sagar was bought back and so was Dekh Bhai Dekh and Hum Log. P Kumar Vasudev’s Basesar Ji and Badki straightened Escobars and Peaky Blinders. Big Brother’s presence in the living room howled down those fierce Netflixes and Amazons. We all felt loved and went back in time. And yes, all this made us feel safe in our semantic cocoons where we didn’t nudge ourselves once over all again.
Nostalgics build castles on the stanchions of small towns, old friends and frugalities of our very beings. With gunky eyes nostalgia peeps across those balustrades of years gone by. Whether it is an old door to dilapidated buildings or a wrinkly patriarch passing by time sitting across ramshackles, or may be those rustic padlocked gates housing endless memories, they soothe us inside out.
Nostalgia heals us from within. Some researchers have suggested that nostalgia can have psychological benefits, such as reducing stress, increasing feelings of social connectedness, and enhancing well-being.
The bourgeois ideals of Provincial Nostalgics are segmented by the clodhoppers of conurbates. We wear those clodhoppers unwanted but desirous.
Nostalgic humans have wrinkled souls. Those wrinkled souls define nights by darkness than those moons. Nostalgics carry their moors in their eyes. Those wrinkles tangle on the cusp of those half-moons with the endless signs of our moor’s!!
We yearn for weekends, yearn for short breaks, yearn for scouting back to our roots of small towns. As we all wish to heal from the wounds, wounds of those leaps across staunchest of desires and craters of time. Nostalgia is the medicine we wishfully gulp down our throats to quench our deserted souls.
Saudade, as they say, is the wistful yearning for someone, someone here being time spent, years gone by, era left across, with shadows of past hankering itself on the dark side of the light. Saudade for the paper moons that we flew in classes, the textures we could feel under school benches of those shapeless marks we drew aimlessly, of those last pages and scribbled corners and left-over broken pieces of time we fail to retrieve from the crevices of drawers. Reminiscence is a deep rooted saudade in the mud of our plants.
But in the end, nostalgia is more than just a song. It’s a gentle reminder that we still belong. That even as time marches on and we grow old we carry with us the stories that we’ve told.
And life is a story beautifully told after all, isn’t it ….
