Once upon a time nostalgia was a concept for middle and old-aged people, no age-shaming, just that they have more lived experiences to narrate. Today, when the time is actually ‘flying’ even 20-year-olds have seen things pass by so quickly that you may sit next to them and hear them say, ‘You know when I was a kid’ and be awed about the fact that they are adults now.
There might not be lots of changes that this generation must have seen, but, one thing has surely changed for them as does for every other generation and that is pop culture, breaking it further, cinema.
The cinema of the 2000’s especially Bollywood (that’s when people today in their 20s were born) was all colours, big sets, drama volts higher than 400, song and dance sequences and everything was fun, even sadness was (yes, it did you hear the bgm there?). Stars like Shahrukh Khan were all over our screens and slowly other names like Jimmy Shergil, R.Madhvan and Imran Khan also started popping up.
As a kid/teen in the 2000’s all of us wanted to enter college in expensive cars, hair flowing with the wind, music in our background and talk in slang we thought was cool. Parties and road trips were what we thought college was all about and rebellion against the ‘wrong’ once in a while was what we wondered was the purpose.
Then we grew up and actually went to college and that was the end of our sweet dreams. Graduating was indeed tough and not at all glamorous. If you were lucky enough, you had fests, once in a while and nukkad nataks were the form of most protests ever. But, we were not the only ones that grew up, the cinema did too. The breeze that blew the hairs has stopped blowing, expensive cars became old fashioned and people started talking exactly like we usually do. And frustration? That was all over the industry and its products. There was always a murder mystery, in and outside colleges and then another one and the other and yet more. Everyone is serious and it is all about the ‘reality’ so much that at times it makes us wonder ‘is reality really that sad?’
The nostalgia trail began from then on. ‘Hey remember, the time when our screens were all red and yellow and pink and blue?’ yes we do, and agree or not, we actually do miss it. A lot of us will still say ‘no, this is better, at least it is real and does not blind us about the reality of the lives ahead’ but the truth is, we all, at least most of us, dearly miss ‘that era’ of cinema, the era of ‘our Bollywood.’The fun fact is, the people making these on screen dreams and dreamy lands stopped doing so, because we did not want it and they seem to understand the nostalgia as well therefore, movies like ‘Satya Prem ki Katha’ and ‘Rocky Rani ki Prem Kahani’ are being made.
Some of us will still say ‘it’s all the same story again and again’ and then some of us will watch the movies because ‘it’s so Bollywood’. And after all of this, some of us will make statements like “Jab mein movie dekh raha tha half end tak vahi purane usme jaa raha tha mein ki rom-com (hai) proper. Aur jis tarah se work hoa hai big sets of Karan Johar, to jo mark hai 2000 ka voh aa raha hai vapas”,- Anirudh (23) after the show was over. And while we are talking about the fact that Y2K nostalgia is real, why not just conclude it with the most cliched yet quite real statement ‘Bollywood does it like nobody else’
