In the distant and dismal past, the family is gathering around the hearth (Daan) in the dark, dingy kitchenette (Daana-kouth) of the old, dilapidated multi-storeyed house, made of unburnt brick and wooden frame (and roofed with birch bark and earth).
The room smells of the wood smoke of the fire. For lighting purposes, the family uses oil in tsoung, the earthen lamp.
The mother prepares to dish out a stew of haakh (collards). The stew is grey and gristly, with no meat or cheese. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters, and the eldest lad is helping his father in stuffing wooden charcoal in the gunny bag.
Outside there’s no noise from traffic. All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window. The tranquility is interrupted by a bronchitis cough (that presages pneumonia and TB) that’ll kill the patient at 35.
The baby will die of smallpox that’s now causing him to cry. Toothache tortures the mother.
Nobody in the family has ever gone to school, read a book, written a page, painted a picture, or heard a piano. Father travels on foot, the distant travel cost him a week’s wages. Others have never traveled more than fifteen kilometres from home.
The family members are dressed in the loosely placed cloaks, the pherans, infested with lice. While males mostly wear a typical Kashmiri skull cap ( or turban) females cover their heads with the headscarf called, kassaba.
The family owns a pair or two of old leather shoes called Pozar, besides a couple of wooden sandals, (khraav) and a few pulahru made from a wisp of rice straw.
The children sleep two to a bed on dirty, patched mattresses on the floor. On the ground floor, the sheep and cattle are penned/crowded into a wooden locker, where the children sit in the winter and where the guest is made to sleep, for it is the warmest place in the house.
As winter comes on, the chinks are stopped by thatch and grass and the dwelling is kept at a hot-house heat by the warm breath of the cattle and sheep, which comes up through openings from the ground floor to the first floor where the family lives.
Notoriously filthy, negligent of personal cleanliness, people live in houses, which are low and dirty, built irregularly and without any method, on narrow tortuous paths.
Few houses have bathrooms or latrines, and small lanes and alleys are used for open defecation. Water connections, taps, bathrooms, water heaters, drainage are all absent.
Slush, filth, and ordure are washed by stormwater into the Jhelum and NalaMa’ar which supply the water to the city through municipal taps. Epidemics like cholera, smallpox, measles, are quite frequent.
In the 21st century, most of us are well off, much better protected against disease, and much more likely to live to old age than our ancestors have ever been. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need is going rapidly.
Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease, and want, our generation has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light-years, nanometres, kilograms/acre, food-miles, air-miles, and of course rupees than any that went before. We’ve more Velcro, vaccines, vitamins, shoes, soap operas, footballs, and anything else we could even imagine needing.
Today, even the poorest have access to a cell phone, internet, television, and a flush toilet that even the wealthiest couldn’t imagine at the turn of the last century. Public health measures dictate standards for drinkable water and breathable air. Many of us live temperature-controlled, disease-controlled lives. And yet, we worry more than ever before. Why?
People think that life was better in the past. They argue that there wasn’t only simplicity, tranquillity, sociability, and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost but virtue too.
The drumbeat having become a cacophony, the generation that’s experiencing abundance more than any generation in history, laps up gloom at every opportunity.
As if every generation since the Palaeolithic deplored the fecklessness of the next and worshiped a golden memory of the past the endless modern laments about how texting and emails are shortening the attention span seem to go back to Plato, who deplored writing as a destroyer of memorising.
The phrase ‘rosy retrospection’ stems from the English idiom, “rose-tinted glasses,” where people see things as better than they’re. The tendency to recall the past more fondly than the present or future leads us to believe that things are worse than they used to be.
We tune into the news to find it difficult not to think that things are constantly getting worse. As elders tell stories about the good old times while lamenting present-day society, our judgment of the present gets clouded as negative, and we think about the way-things-once-were, with rosy retrospection, nostalgia, and romanticism.
Our survival instinct causes us to always be on the lookout for threats and dangers and never become complacent.
Despite having moved away from our more primitive days in today’s world, we continue to consider our current socio-economic position under threat, leading us to negative attitudes towards others.
Besides, our present emotions, skewed by the negativity bias, hold much greater weight in decision-making than our past emotions.
We tend to believe that things are worse now than they once were and that things are only going to continue in that negative trend. In romanticising the past, we forget how much progress has been made.
It seems that no matter the actual current state of affairs, people will always think that times were better in the past. Having a more rosy picture of the past, which for people is young-adulthood, coincides with more emotionally salient memories, and recollection of young adulthood free of worries and responsibilities, rich enough to paint a rosy picture of the past.
Known as the reminiscence bump, the most vivid long-term memories are often sourced from the ages between 10-30, with a concentration of memories of personal events occurring during one’s ’20s, when many of life’s significant moments occur.
It’s likely that there were similar wars and protests as we’ve now when they’re younger, but then these aren’t the events people associate with their younger days.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK