Longing For The Wonder Years

When the  sixties swung into the seventies to the beat of RD Burman’s Spanish guitar and Amitabh Bachchan’s angst, in retrospect, it was the end of the happy endings in Hindi cinema. 20 years into independence, the political reality of India had become far more complex, dark and divisive to allow films to be set on house boats, shikaras, hill stations amid perpetually singing and dancing `extras.’

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The sunshine turned occasionally grey and the guitar strumming hero was now an iconic dock coolie, a smuggler, a thief, an angry police inspector but as Shah Rukh Khan observed while revisiting Don, there was a certain innocence about evil, then. It was not the evil we see in films like A Wednesday or Black Friday.

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When director Milan Lutheria recreated the seventies in Once Upon a Time in Mumbai and revisited the Haji Mastan and Dawood lore and dressed Prachi Desai in Bobby’s knotted blouse and mini skirt, it was  time to look back and wonder.  And to ask if nostalgia is ever about what is lost around us? Or is it about what we have lost within us? Our capacity for innocence. Our passion for life. Our sense of connection with the reality around us.

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Romantic, revolutionary Urdu poet Majaaz once lamented, “Woh gudaaz-e-dil-e-marhoom kahan se laaoon..ab mein wo jazba-e-masoom kahan se laaoon (How do I kindle the tenderness of my heart? Where do I find the innocence lost forever?).  He was born in 1909 but is still emblematic of  every one who has ever mourned the loss of  something as intangible and fragile as a sense of youth.

The transition from the seventies and eighties to now has been even more brutal.

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In a recent art exhibition curated by Shaheen Merali, Chennai-based artist Parvathy Nayar juxtaposed iconic and simplistic imagery of romance from classics such as Awara and South-Indian mythological films with startling graphic representation of an egg and a sperm. This shift from poetry to biology, from Devdas to Dev D has befuddled a certain generation that has had to grow up in a world where landmark memories of  sights, sounds, smells of  personal significance have been erased and replaced by unfamiliar reference points suddenly and with as much finality as Doordarshan was erased by satellite TV from our memory.

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Today, there is a collective craning of necks to look wistfully at the 70s and the 80s, the last clutch of so called wonder years when friends were real and not virtual.  Reality TV had not taken over reality. Neighbourhood banter  had not yet been replaced by social networking sites and points of view had not been condensed to tweets. Hard bound digests of Amar Chitra Katha, Indrajal comics, Nandan, Champak and Lotpot were read avidly. Mohammed Rafi, Kishore Kumar and RD Burman were alive. Films ran for 25 weeks and the term pan-Indian hit was not needed because when a film worked, it worked across all divides.

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When we identified more with Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony than with Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. When Ramesh Sippy triumphantly turned Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai into Jai and Veeru and stirred Bhelpuri aesthetics and the swagger of a spaghetti Western into Sholay.

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A time when film songs, radio and TV jingles could be hummed from beginning to end because they connected with us.

This nostalgia for larger-than-life heroes and villains, street smart dialogues, trend setting clothes and  unforgettable back ground music composed by the likes of Kalyan Ji Anand Ji (Don), Laxmikant Pyarelal (Karz) and RD Burman (Sholay) has also inspired Farhan Akhtar’s Don and Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om. 

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Advertisements are popping up to flaunt candy colours, white shoes and bouffants. Songs like, “Din hai suhana aaj pehli taarikh hai” recall Indian cinema’s uncomplicated, joy saturated narratives. The fact that just over 20 years ago, families were happy watching just one movie a week, two chitrahaars, just one news purveyor seems almost unimaginable. Architect Kavya Thimaaiah Prasanna recalls,“I miss the times when everyone watched the same shows on TV and then discussed the same movies, ads or news. Such simple times!”

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An email being forwarded relentlessly by the lost teenagers of the eighties recalls the abundance of three ice-cream flavours, prized Fiats or an Ambassador with hand sewn lace curtains on the windows, HMT watches, the morning music of All India Radio, Sunday gatherings depending on who had the colour TV in the neighbourhood, Salma Sultan’s lone rose and just the hint of a smile, the plastic covers that covered TV, fridge and a `mixi’ and Nazia Hassan,  the lone voice of teen longings.  Asma, a Chennai based writer and social activist says, “An evening powercut was always welcome because it meant time away from homework and more time in the playground.Each time you went to a film with your family, you would narrate, even enact the story to your friends who hadn’t seen it. Every kid died like Amitabh in Sholay, atleast once! And treats (like Mangola) had to be earned.”

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For Asma,  those years have indelible recall value as she rattles off jingles and brands that no longer are heard or seen. She also recalls, “Hawa Mahal, Binaca Geet Mala, Bhule Bisre Geet, Vishesh Jaimala!”  But artist Parvathy Nayar smiles at the deluge of sentiment for the lost decades and says, “Those decades had their own issues..nostalgia makes us remember only fragments that we are comfortable with.”

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Curater Shaheen Merali believes that the voice of diversity is always a welcome thing. He says, “There was an imposition of homogeneity through television which is no longer there now. Now we have news in every Indian language. The media is beginning to display urgency with local, regional issues which was never there earlier. Yes, we miss those times perhaps because now we are over consuming everything.  We aspire for an apartment and multiple helpers around the house and excess has become basic.Trees have given away to roads. Pollution is a reality. As are the cracks in Hampi’s architecture.” But he conveys, the past is never perfect. Our perception makes it so.

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Clare Arni, photographer and chronicler of rivers, vanishing professions, old architecture and lost decades however often browses the old curiosity shops in Bangalore’s markets and collects vintage film posters and redundant objects of street kitsch.

She says, “The detailing, the depth of light and shadows in the posters of the past speak of a passion for detail and a romance that is missing now.”

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It is hard to say if the past was better but it was different and we were different too.  Perhaps regret always underscores change. Perhaps a few decades from now, another generation will be looking back in wonder and feeling with a pang, the loss of their youth and the homelessness of their memories.

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