Coming home

It has been a year since I last visited Chennai. You know how it is! When one is away from one's home (now, which one is this? I have three - the home where my mom is, my husband's home and my home in Goa) - I would call it the Chennai home, the place where I grew up, studied, loved, lost and finally left after getting married. Well, staying away from Chennai makes me yearn for it - pining would be a strong word, perhaps longing would fit - Chennai in my imagination is all mellow and soft with edges burnt with the flame of nostalgia and preserved smells like a template. I go ooh and aah and let out sighs and sounds of emotional outbursts to the great amusement and anger of my sibling who finds my gushing a bit above the prescribed limits. I don't mind those admonitions feeling only happiness and loaded sentiments.

Then the heat gets on to you - First it touches you, you brush it off; Then it spreads across, smothering you, you try to ignore it; It coerces you to say it, I suppress the words;

Finally, I spit it out - "It is so hot! Goa is not so hot!"

The entire bubble of emotions and nostalgia goes away, Woosh! Then another wave of nostalgia fills the gaping hole of the previous one - Well, this wave is the grand narrative of heat nostalgia - Of how it used to be hot those days and we did not bother but now the heat is unbearable and that we have become creatures of comfort and that we were better off without internet, blah blah and that we read and played and ate chilly-*^%$ing-mangoes! Ah! Have you experienced nostalgia fatigue - where one nostalgia replaces another and finally you wonder whether the reality that you are living is much better.

Coming home is always lovely - until your imagination wears off and you itch to get back to your regime and routine.

Assessing my states of mind sometimes I wonder what is the home that I am longing for - this is a perennially running question in my mind - whether home is a place, person, emotion or imagination and I wonder whether I will ever get an answer.

I wish it was as simple as clicking 'Home' on Facebook and watching the people on your list ranting, raving, expressing and lying.

City love

When you're happening to travel alone in an auto . . . oops, metered Chennai auto from Egmore to home, which is quite a distance of 16kms, your auto meanders through many flyovers and you get to see a wonderful city bathed in the lights of the numerous street lights that illuminate the roads. It was about 9. 45 pm and with no one to converse, brushed by the gentle breeze of the night, I fell in love with Chennai all over again. I craned my eyes to see beneath the flyovers if the auto was driving above a road and tried to look above and side ways if the auto travelled beneath a flyover. Cities look beautiful at night, especially Chennai with wide roads and multiple lights of different hues - I could soak in those sights like a love-lorn lover or a love-sick poet. The heat and dry humid wind of the day time does not evoke such love unless one is so stricken by the city that even the heat is exalted. I think I like to be a realist here. The gliding Government buses, bikes with couples, cars with hurrying families or singletons blasting radios while casting a stray lingering look at the passing by woman/man sitting in the pillion or auto-rickshaws getting back home after a tiring day -- everything presents a lovely sight. Parallel to these sights, I also imagine the Chennai when I was a regular on those roads, mindless of the heat and sweat and always walking purposefully and never once glanced a loving glance at the city.

This gush of love first began showing its streaks when I started reading the post, "Those girls on Mount Road" by Snigdha Manickavel which was shared recently on Facebook by Jothi Vel Moorthy. I could relate with that writer's perspective on Chennai and tender feelings of joy started taking wings within me and I wanted to reach out to all the places in Chennai that I have known and loved - The place where I went to school lazily walking about on the roads and sharing love notes and class gossips; the bus-stop where I drank Panneer soda; British Council of the early 2000s; WCC and MCC . . . There are many such places.

While reading Manickavel's post, I also remembered another article that I read a day ago in The Economic Times where a certain French writer, Bennet Voyles in his article, "Paris is not Paree anymore; outshined by London, New York" laments that Paris has lost all the seemingly French traits and that London is more French than Paris! He lists many points that were quintessentially French but now is no longer seen in Paris. Can a city every lose the traits that made it, I wondered. Can Chennai ever lose its peculiar traits. It might, otherwise there wouldn't be so many complaining that Chennai is not the same Madras anymore. Will a day come when the spirit of Chennai will be seen only in blog posts and Madras Muthiah's articles, I wonder. But what is this spirit of Chennai that so defines this city -- Is it the healthy idli-dosa-sambar-chutney or the magic tunes of December Festival or the safety factor that makes women fearless on the roads even at 11 pm or 12 pm or the balance between tradition and modernity or the connectivity of the city or just the feel of being in a relatively calm and secure place. I cannot put my finger on any one point.


Well, I just hope Chennai doesn't lose its peculiar Chennai flavour like Paris! Inspite of everything, every time I return to Chennai, I see so many additions to this place and those additions please and irritate me as and how my mood commands but last night while travelling home in that auto, every single sight was being taken in by me as aspects of that city which I have grown to love gradually and all those sights spelt - 'This is home!'

When nostalgia gets a tad boring

I often wonder how long can one get nostalgic over and over the same bit that happened some time ago in our lives. Won't the nostalgia stop? Will one nostalgia replace another? Will we stop getting nostalgic after we have exhausted the emotion so much like the cassette that finally wears out due to overuse.

This is a fairly recent happening and I find it pretty amusing. I think about a beautiful memory and find that I keep returning to it every single day and by the time I've thought about it for some time now that I feel tired to think of it anymore. Succeeding that 'boring nostalgia' phase is an aversion to that memory. It is then I realise that overdoing nostalgia also gets boring. But isn't nostalgia something sweet and beautiful. Maybe when it strikes once a while to refresh the bygone years and moments but feelings of longing that strike very often lose their appeal over time. Well, the etymology of nostalgia is from the word, 'nostos' meaning homecoming. Now, I guess that during the time the word was coined, it was meant for someone who was away from home and was longing for home - the physical home and the emotional security that is often associated with the home. But now the word has evolved and comes to mean memory and longing for something that was once part of our lives, not necessarily the home itself. That's what I love about words - they evolve, wrapping in the mood and the times and mould according to the context. They change but still retain their spirit.

Coming back to nostalgia, I wonder how long will something remain so precious and lovely that each time we are filled with yearning, we feel nostalgia. I guess even nostalgia changes, rather it evolves to something else before going through a few steps: Initially the memory is beautiful and comes to our mind when we yearn for the past. Then we start clinging so much to that specific memory that nostalgia becomes the norm each day. Finally we are done looking at that memory from a trillion angles that we have explored every fine fabric of that particular memory. Then we break forth and no longer relish that memory. The nostalgia of that memory gets boring and we don't feel like returning to that for quite some time. Perhaps after a long time, the cycle will begin again.

Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps.

Dear reader what do you have to say on this?

Image 1: Internet
Image 2: Internet