Small wonders
Being a kid is arduous for those who never grow up. For the rest of us, it’s a village we keep revisiting as per our convenience. Or inconvenience. What happened years ago remains open to manipulation when we fail to remember. And more often than not, what we call ‘memories’ are aided by people close to us. The context to a tale or a picture or even a video clip is added externally. A kid, through his growing years, is at will to theorize. That’s allowed when you are a grownup. This mental conditioning, sometimes, compels us to photoshop our past. Thus, giving rising to the so-called good ol’ days.
Let’s say you are tagged in your second grade school group picture but can’t name even half of the students or teachers in it. You knew all of them back then, if not by character, then at least by name. Today, your addled mind has moved on to another era. Which is why it isn’t entirely your fault. As suggested earlier, your childhood is a different venue altogether. Your innocence spoke the loudest back then. There were no overtures to a planned future. You may have harboured silent dreams about becoming a policeman and reveled in the glory of animation but it’d be misleading to conclude that you were aware of what was going on.
Nobody does.
Welcome to the trap we live in. A series of crisply edited episodes of what occurred and how we interpreted them as kids. A self-inflicted psychological game. I pristinely remember how mindfucked I was when I saw Shilpa Shetty in another movie, months after watching Baazigar (1993). Inside my hollow head, once an actor died, s/he is dead and gone, never to show up in any other film ever again. And if this wasn’t cripplingly cute enough, I remember my cousin denying the news of Divya Bharti’s death just because he’d seen her in a movie the day before! Kids, back in my days, to put it dramatically, were indeed stupid. Today’s younger lot is evidently smarter. And yet, it remains to be seen whether these children will be able to fathom all the people they grew up with in the distant future. Or for that matter, fact-check the events that are happening in their lives today and will be repackaged as memories tomorrow.
Who will remember what?
Here’s the worse news: The adults of today haven’t escaped the aforementioned trap just because they’ve grown tall and can enjoy ice cream whenever they like. Four to five decades later, they might be unable to see what really unfolded during their youth. Yes, they’d have clues about the whereabouts of their past but it won’t be a straight story.
It never is.
If childhood is a village, then adulthood would become a city too flashy for our dry old eyes to know any better.
