Selective nostalgia

Looking back, it seems, is the new thinking. There are a number of online forums still trying to get to the bottom of what Nietzsche might have meant when he wrote, “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” Memory, after all, is as fickle as it is increasingly becoming redundant. Redundant because, in what is easily the age of peak nostalgia, no more can the past be mined to draw what hasn’t already been celebrated to within an inch of its worth.

A good example of this would be the recently released and much-celebrated web series Yeh Meri Family on the YouTube channel The Viral Fever. Dressed as a sentimental journey through “simpler times”, the series sits at the intersection of rhetoric and nostalgia, filled with as many toasts to ’90s paraphernalia as possible. This redrawn past, which is not nearly as interrogated as it is celebrated, is much like a poster stuck outside the closet of memory. But of the skeletons inside, it offers as narrow a view as its idea of “simple” will allow.

Set in Jaipur and told from the perspective of a self-aware 13-year-old Harshu, the series narrates the events that unfold over the summer in a happy Indian family that includes Harshu’s younger sister, an elder brother in his late teens, an unstylish yet likeable father, and a righteously outspoken mother (played by Mona Singh of Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahi fame).

In choosing the middle sibling to tell the story, the script ensures it can play innocent by default.

The unending reference to the ’90s extends even to titling each episode after retro games such as Pukam Pukai and Chupan Chupai .

The first episode itself is packed with glimpses of a Nagraj comic, the Gold Spot cola, a Vespa scooter, a poster of Akshay Kumar’s Aflatoon and other anodyne mannerisms of ’90s kids, clearly inserted to draw out relatable ‘awwws’. And it is easy to see why this particular theme gets recycled so often. The target audience are the millennials, who grew up during the ’90s, much like the ones who conceive these shows and articles.

Yeh Meri Family introspects only in the face of impending epiphanies, mortgaging prickly depth in exchange for its protagonists’ unscathed escape from judgement of any sort. Harshu’s self-realisations, for example, range from “Papa cool dikhte nahi , Papa cool hain (Papa doesn’t just look cool, Papa is cool)” to his mom being the manja (thread) that keeps the kite soaring.

Though millennials are perhaps its most vocal and expressive flagbearers, the idea of the past as a place we were better off in, has always been popular. It is not the premise, though, that is troubling, but what it perpetuates. And not just drama or entertainment, even politics around the world is constantly twisting its neck to look back, seemingly wanting to dig history for gold. America wants to be great again, never mind if there is no way of knowing if it ever was before. Closer home, too, history has become as much a quarry for establishing one-upmanship as it once served as lesson for deep-dives.

Racism and xenophobia are rooted in history. The idea of one race, one country, one city, one people being infiltrated by another is merely a retrospective restructuring of “we were better-off when we were alone”.

Nothing could be more implausible than a past deemed glorious for being untouched, unshared by that of another. But those are ideas that we must grasp as a collective, as seemingly distant as that future sounds.

What Yeh Meri Family does is acutely personal, both in its near-sightedness and unintended consequence.

There is no metric that qualifies the ’90s as a simpler, easier time to live in. It was an age as riddled with sociocultural problems as we ascribe to the present. Its simplicity is derived from its ignorance, back when we did not offer ourselves to the world as much as we do today. Further, for every 13-year-old Harshu, there are millions of other young women and men who have silently lived through abuse, both physical and mental, through the ’90s. To them Yeh Meri Family must feel like wishful thinking.

Perhaps Nietzsche knew of the tiredness each age feels, perhaps he even saw the tiredness in accommodating change or questioning it, an inconvenience we feel strongly enough to attack our own past, to erase all sense of loss and longing. That said, a series like Yeh Meri Family will soar, chime with manipulative glee across platforms on social media because it revels in what it omits, and not what it includes. Much like the average Indian family, perhaps. Lest someone ask, must memory become the franchise of nostalgia?

Manik Sharma writes on arts and culture

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