Nostalgia,In The Age Of Social Media

I am scrolling through Twitter. I have tweeted about the daily displays of sexism I am sick of facing, and got a few favourites.

I am back on Twitter after a very long time, so I find myself going back to my own profile. In my photo gallery here, I am, when I appear, eighteen. Chubby-even more then than now,more pimples,hair freshly shorn. There are other photos too-books I am reading,snug under blankets as I wait for first my board exam results, and then university acceptances to come along. The first few days of college, and I am documenting every stretch of campus I am newly enraptured with.

Instagram. The story is the same. Hazy shots of books strewn across bedsheets, screenshots galore, shrines in dedication to my seventeen-year old mind’s heroes-Jim Morrison, Edie Sedgwick, Talitha Getty, Janis Joplin.These give way to a month spent vacationing in Delhi, then starting university-here again, a campus documented lovingly,if rigorously.

Someone said the digital media has killed albums-photo albums handed down generations, the intimacy of leafing through your childhood, your family huddled round you.

I am sure it has its charms. But..they died with Facebook,with Instagram,with the new non-commitment  of Snapchat and Instagram stories-they are replaced,you allege,by something that doesn’t deserve to replace them.

But these are our albums now,our stacks of journals,our letters,and these are our feeble,frantic,tiny histories.

What social media lets us do is tell our own stories. A little filtered maybe, a little adjusted sometimes to suit society’s expectations, or win its approval.

We still document,we still archive,we edit a little with time-who hasn’t?What documentation is, in this age,is a very personal, very individual-if not a little narcissistic, affair.

I am scrolling through Twitter,and I am thinking of nights I spent in a similar way,the glaring blue-and-white screen providing a series of distractions from the inevitable worries-results,college acceptances…I am thinking of playing Mohiner Ghoraguli in my room,alone, on a night like this-and dreaming of all university would open up to me,if only it opened up its gates. I am thinking of the youth I dreamed up and never got to live-the spirit of rebellion bubbling down from the 50s Beats-Hungryalists, and the 60s surges of counterculture-the rebellion that bubbles down to a Facebook post or two.I am thinking of the book by Deborah Baker I read, about the Beats in India-the quotes from the Kolkata chapter neatly archived on my Tumblr. I am thinking of the scarlet dupatta I bought from the Gujarat emporium on my 18th birthday and how pretty it made me feel.

This is how we assert life,dangling earrings and a selfie-I was here,I flaunted a defiant crimson smile. We leave traces of our thoughts,trickling off our heads,messy and glorious,we scatter our rage and our laughter onto Tumblr #aesthetics.

It is just part of how we live, do not dare tell us we are anything short of majestic.

Submarine

In a complex unfolding of events,Alex Turner and Submarine led me to each other.

It was like this-listening to Alex’s solo work for the film was what made me fall decisively in love with him,and the music got me interested in the film.

The distinct aesthetic-purposefully juvenile,a quirky understated one-of the film caught my eye in fan made music videos for the songs,and it held my gaze once again when I watched the film.

The protagonist is a high school boy-awkward,cowardly,sometimes mean and selfish,sometimes not but definitely unheroic. He belongs to the inherently flawed,seemingly causelessly tormented trope of adolescent so popularly seen in coming of age narratives-determined to seem okay,determined to fit in.

He lives in a village in England with his parents and has a love interest in his classmate,Jordana.

Oliver’s world seems a calm.orderly one and largely stays so,but there are events here and there that cause ripples in otherwise calm water-betraying a bewildering turbulence behind the apparently unremarkable and mundane.

Submarine isn’t a film about the ostensibly exemplary. It shows an unremarkable boy’s unremarkable life,and in doing so,it does a lovely job of capturing the adolescence experience.

It doesn’t show you anything that hasn’t already been seen,tell you much that hasn’t already been talked about at length.

It is,however,beautifully shot,beautifully made and monumentally heartwarming.

The characters are lifelike,flaws and all,and endearing for all that.

What Submarine promises is more an experience than a movie-the music and the visuals unite to bring to the audience a vividly realistic slice of life,as it is known and lived by a teenage boy who clambers awkwardly on the way to adulthood,falling and scraping his knees,it is true but learning and never ceasing to move along,aware though he may or may not be of the fact.