Past forward!

Time does wonderful things to even the most prosaic events. I think all of us are smitten by nostalgia. Nostalgia explained lexically is a longing for the past. How do you whip up loads of this good stuff?

The recipe is simple. Take loads of optimism, add bunches of love, a couple of hugs and cuddles and a generous zing of happiness and voila! What you have is nostalgia.

When it comes to thinking about the bygone years, I must admit, I am as guilty about romanticising about it as you are. Why do we have this need to drape it with a pale, golden sepia patina?

We all remember the fun filled days of childhood, climbing mango trees, running around wild and unchecked with not a worry in the world. But was it really all that perfect?

How many of us remember a Machiavellian uncle, who raked up rancour and ignited vicious quarrels over property at home, the sulking mother or the choleric aunt who would put the fear of God and the Bogeyman in us?

We happily wipe out the musty smell of damp, stinking walls during the monsoons, the tedium of our school lives, the bullying by cousins or the numerous wounds and nicks we had. That's the magic of our selective memory at work.

Ultimate celebration

Some of the Hollywood war movies are an ultimate celebration of nostalgia. Those winsome nurses pining for their fiances at war, those young patriotic soldiers fighting in trenches and singing songs of bravery, gleaming black vintage cars on London roads, old ideals spouted in simple dialogues, just steal your heart away and you begin to think of the two World Wars as exemplar times of compassion, restraint, sacrifice and sublime emotions.

One of the thinkers (I can't recall his name) described it beautifully. He said: "Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson, you find the present tense and the past perfect".

I like to think it is more like an efficient defence mechanism that all human beings have. The unpleasant memories shrivel and fall off like rotten fruit; it's only the plumpest, juiciest fruits that stay on the tree of life.

As time flows, this tree gets denser and greener and those "rotten fruits" that do not shrivel away are the lows of our lives that are camouflaged in a brilliant green. Only the strongest highs are visible.

So when we think back, we pick out the happiest memories. The unhappy ones are not obliterated, but lie dormant and unexplored in anonymity.

That is why when we need to purge ourselves of our fears and complexes, the hypno-therapist has to cut through the foliage and pick out those memories lying hidden from our visibility.

An abusive past, a violent encounter in the dark, a traumatic accident.... when we look them in the face, we are able to face our demons and totally obliterate them from our consciousness.

Today we may be besieged by the growing pains of our times, struggling with traffic, spiralling inflation, rising rents, budget blues, cantankerous neighbours and rebellious kids.

Add to that the impending gloom of global warming and we might feel like apocalypse is but a few years away. But this same period ten years later might bring back fond memories of merry barbecues, endless partying and a carefree life to your mind.

When it comes to memories, our mind is like a classic, ornate family album where page after page contains pictures of us smiling luminously as though life has been one long chapter of sheer bliss!