of nostalgia and growing up in the early ’90s

Whenever I use the word nostalgia, my wife says it is my excuse for remembering those girlfriends of the yore. For me, nostalgia is actually an excuse to remember my times with my boy-friends. But yes, those are the times when me and my friends chased those girls!

The word nostalgia comes from Greek, nostos meaning returning home and algos meaning pain. At a time in the past, it was used to describe as a medical condition! Nostalgia was one condition which used to cause deaths, especially to soldiers who were posted far away from home. Now it doesn’t exist as a medical category but still is attributed to many psychological conditions, depression and as a possible factor attributed to some suicides.

Age 7 (1987): OK, so back to my nostalgic memories comprising of just boys and girls. It was class 2 and I was like less than 7-8 years old. We were sitting in the classroom, I guess it was a free period though the teacher was there. Suddenly, in between, the boy sitting next to me poked me and went down the benches. Soon I followed, and there I watched with awestruck eyes the vision I will remember for the rest of my life. No, it was not the holy cross appearing on the wall. It was my first sight of the chaddi (slang for underwear) of a girl! and that too a blue chaddi! You can guess how vivid the memory is when I exclaim the color. Some of the girls were sitting on the floor, leaning their backs on the wall facing us, with their legs upright opening the gateways to a new, previously unknown, foreign land. These memories… that is what I call nostalgia 😈

Age 10 (1990): By the time we graduated to class 5, complex, intricate, dynamics ran throughout the class. This we understood only by the end of that year. A smart, dynamic young boy had joined our class in the middle of the year and had shattered all the dynamics in the class. Just after 2-3 weeks of his joining, he captured the smiles of the smartest girl of the lot. This girl was smart in studies and sports and she was pretty as well!! There were too many fans for her in the class, but none shared the secret with others. By the end of the year, the whole world conspired against this smart boy and cornered him. Last day of that year, somehow, from all sides, 4-5 boys “including me” cornered him and started pushing him. We don’t know how we all got together because it was not planned at all. Anyways it didn’t matter to us. We didn’t want a newcomer to take the girl making a fool of all of us. When he was pushed back, he caught my shirt to balance himself. The shirt I was wearing didn’t have one of the buttons and I made that a chance, accusing him for tearing off my shirt. The pandemoneum which followed – dragged him from the classroom – all the way to the basketball court. Poor boy. My autorikshaw back to home was waiting near the basketball court. So, unfortunately or fortunately, I had but to hurry off leaving the job to the others. Those are memories… that is what I should call nostalgia, right?

under the table

Age 15 (1995): Then it was class 10. We were no longer at the mercy of external dynamics. We created our own, internal, dynamics. Probably it started off as an accident from our extra scholastic mind. Excessive and vigorous use of pens and pencils used to cause them to fall on the floor, confirming Newton’s gravitational discoveries. Following Newton’s discoveries, we had our own discoveries as well. If a pen or pencil fell down, we competed to go down and search for it. You know, Larry Page was not yet at Stanford, and google was not even in the embryonic stage. So we had to be our own crawlers, and we crawled on the floor, and did our own searches for the pencil. We “stumbled upon” several gorgeous, mind-blowing structures while crawling under these benches. We indexed these crawls in our mind, for later use (?!) and I could still visualize myself under those benches… Now, aren’ t they memories? Don’t they make you nostalgic??

school footbal match by the stream

Age 17 (1997): So let us move on to class 12. By this time, all of those boys had their hormones working at its peak. Especially those who previously sat ON the benches instead of crawling UNDER! This I came to understand through the daily football matches we had. After the school time, we had almost all of the boys in our class moving on to the school playground. This playground was blessed with a stream flowing by its border. So what? Semi clad, young, water nymphs from the neighboring regions used to take bath and wash their clothes in that stream. What other heavenly boon should an adolescent boy ask for?! It always happened that the football matches were one-sided. Or to be technically accurate, the football never touched one side of the ground. It was always rushing to the other side of the ground where the stream touched it; where those nymphs moved around. Blame the dirty football! It doesn’t stop on the other side of the ground, but it always rushed down the stream. About 5-10 of the boys run down the ground and to the stream to fetch one football. About 20 boys (including the goal keeper from the other side) stand at the brink of the ground watching the huge event. “Event” in the sense, retrieving the football; not the young, fresh, round, ripe, water melons waiting to jump out of the wet wraparounds of those water nymphs! When I tell you that this happened every few seconds during the match, and that all the boys in our class participated in it, you will understand the dynamics behind it. If I don’t get nostalgic about those memories, you or at least one of those boys will beat me up!

18 Responses

  1. lol brought back my own flashbacks !

    btw , were you one of the “elite” backbenchers of the class by any chance ? 😉

    I was one elitist :p

    • rocksea says:

      Among 5 of the schools I studied, at least 3 had the rotation system. One week you are at the backbench, and next week you are at the front bench 😀 But that blessed us with varied perspectives, you see 😛

  2. Neethu says:

    Having been at the same school where you did 12th, I am reminded of the little rivulet behind the playground. Whenever the boys played football the ball used to fall into the channel every other minute..It was an inexplicable phenomenon then and I used to wonder if the slope of the land had something to do with it, but now i very well know the reason.. 🙂

    • rocksea says:

      It is great to hear from someone who have been at the same school, and witnessed similar events 🙂 Last time when I went there, I saw that a wall was built along the borders of the playground. Also the present school authorities are adamant that they don’t want the students to do anything other than study, even after school hours! So probably this phenomenon has ceased to exist.

  3. Anwin says:

    Yes, I am from the ’90s and I had a lot of fun. I am still having fun with fun being right on top of what I want to do everyday, even today 🙂

    And surprisingly you went to school and college at the same times as myself. It was interesting to read your expriences.

  4. Cuckoo says:

    Don’t you have subscription for comments ? If not, would request you to have it.

    Thanks.

    • rocksea says:

      Hey cuckoo, subscription to comments by feed or by email? By feed is available to all posts. For example, for this post, it is: https://www.rocksea.org/nostalgia-growing-up-early-90s/feed i.e. Just add /feed to any post. [It can also be seen through the feed icon on your browser]. If you are thinking about “subscription by email”, i will add some plugin for that.

      • Cuckoo says:

        No I didn’t mean feed for posts. That I have subscribed to the very first day I knew of your blog. 🙂

        I am talking about subscription to comments. So that whenever a new comment appears on your post, I come to know of it. I don’t have to come here again & again to check.

        There is a separate feed for comments & there is a plugin available for that.

  5. Sharad says:

    hahaha… truly nostalgic..

    and I can say it is a typical school boy memory…

    and I disagree to your fact about masturbation, I think is very close to 100% 🙂 🙂

    Enjyed the post alot..and sketched are fantastic..

    • rocksea says:

      Yes! Everybody may have such stories to tell.

      On masturbation, what you told is exactly what I had implied: 95 + 5 = 100% 😀

      danks danks 🙂 Sketches from my darling sarah.

  6. Cuckoo says:

    Ha Ha Ha…. Boys will always be boys. 😀 That’s the way they are made of. It’s in their DNA !

    I liked this post very much. Well narrated and well supported with sketches. Who made them? You or your wife?

    Have you read my nostalgic posts ? But based on songs, they are very different from yours.

    Here is the link.
    cuckooscosmos.com/Musings/2009/05/21/nostalgic-moments-i/

    • rocksea says:

      🙂 My memories, but colored by sarah hehe. I used to do the sketches long back (when I used to post in malayalam). This time I coaxed sarah to do it and they came out excellent!

      Just read your nostalgic posts :D, thanks a lot! Sarah always keep singing jungle jungle phool khila… may be she also has such stories to tell!

  7. Abhilash says:

    Appa! really nostalgic…

    I hope you still do the same things to create nostalgia for your sixties and seventies… 😀

    Roxy you went deep under the tables and benches to see blue chaddi… So bad and so sad… the youth wears chaddi in such a way that, no need for going beneath the bench… you can see them above the pants…

    Read this post for more details…

    abhilifelapazzo.blogspot.com/2009/07/levis-strauss-style-jockey-acquired.html

    abhilifelapazzo.blogspot.com/2009/07/cochin-fashion-version-street-30.html

    • rocksea says:

      hehe 🙂

      Yes I guess these pranks of the yester-years are nothing compared to those of these days – when all these are part of daily life and fashion statements! I had seen your posts on the kochi fashion trends 🙂 I would say kochi is slow in catching up with the western world!! I had seen those trends both in Japan and Europe, where these guys n gals wear their trousers so low that they almost stay at their knees. No need to talk about their chaddis, which also stay much below, showing off their valuables…

  8. Elaine- says:

    hey! no photographs for me to comment on, so i will say that those are cute pictures of your childhood intermingled with your nostalgia!

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