RELATIONSHIP
OPINION
love letter today is almost an act of nostalgia .
Whether it was the face-to-face drama or the ritual of letter-writing , both had a quality one misses today — the power and poetics of memory . Memory was a continent in itself , a world that went beyond Freudian analyses and demanded the ecstasy of storytelling . A relationship without memory was seen as poverty stricken . Memory gave depth and poetry to a relationship . It allowed a relationship to unfold . I remember myself impulsively asking my students in class one day , “ Describe your grandmother ’ s face and tell me about her .” The students hesitated . A few in chorus said , “ They are so old ,” as if the very idea of oldness allowed for erasure . I asked them , “ Did you ever touch her face ?” and the question almost seemed repulsive . Then in desperation , I asked them , “ Tell me about her pickle ,” and suddenly some rivulet of emotion unlocked in him . In the little sensorium of a pickle , an old woman suddenly came alive .
IN fact , old age and old people are one relationship we have abbreviated . Kids sit involved in their computers as if they are the new rudraksh impervious to grandparents . They become like wallpaper , or silhouettes watching TV as you return home from play . The decline in the quality of some relationships is seen in the way we construct old age . Senile dementia is almost a downloaded disease , which transforms the man who was once your father into a difficult patient . Somewhere , despite all the legends about joint families , we have lost the sense of relationship with old people . Old is almost equated to obsolescent and erasable , and old age is one niche of relationships we as a country must relearn and rethink . Every time I see old people sitting at traffic lights and waiting emptily in parks , I feel the tragedy of relationships begins with old age . Once the old were storytellers ; today it is old age itself that needs a poetics of storytelling to restore and re-embed it into the dynamics of everyday conversation between generations .
Yet today a WhatsApp family group can capture the dynamics and tensions of a joint family . WhatsApp recreates some of the tensions of patriarchy ; or the ideological and aesthetic differences between generations . Yet the magic is not quite that of a face-to-face relationship , of a quiet walk punctuated by gossip and silence with your grandfather .
I must confess a bias before I proceed with the rest of the essay . I am what my students call technologically retarded . My enthusiasm for the telephone and the computer as ways of sustaining relationships is stilted . In this McLuhanese era where technology sustains and defines relationships , I feel out of place but still curious . I try to
I think this generation is learning to construct a whole new aesthetics of friendship , mainly between equals . learn the new language , the shorthand glossary that one needs to be a native in this world . A date today has a repertoire of tactics from benching , stashing and haunting to breadcrumbing , which makes me wonder if these relations are language games or exercises in human spontaneity and community .
The internet seems to create a new sense of community one calls the network . It has its own rituals and glossary , and it attracts the young in a way I can only comprehend anthropologically . The young seem a different tribe and yet they seem to have their own pressures . The need to be liked demands almost a visible assurance and one tinkers with history to provide proof of how well liked or popular one is . An Instagram in a way distances one from real life . Secondly , there is a tyranny of instant time captured in the assembly line of selfies , where every event in a relationship needs a marker , a mnemonic , a compulsion to record that strips actual memory bare . It is as if the relationship is in the records and the perusal of the records . A relationship without exhibits seems unthinkable . Silence seems to have no place in such a world . There is also a sense of the crowd , a need for acclamation that seems almost artificial .
But one is not native to this world and has not quite mastered the nuances of this language . There is even a scientism that seems to think any problem in a relationship is solvable through the right formula . I admit such a world needs its own Freuds and Prousts . I am content to watch and listen to a homemade translation between this world and mine . It has , I admit , an excitement that someone else could convey better . Relationships contoured by technology have an idiom which a different soc iology has to convey today .
Yet , to me , it is not technology that defines this generation , but a search for relationships beyond the family . I think it is learning to construct a new aesthetics of friendship , a friendship mainly between peer groups and equals , a friendship that adds an ecological sustenance to the vulnerability of the family . The friend and the idea of friendships is the new narrative of emotionality . A sense of friendship recreates memory , challenges the demands of the official , creates a celebration of the face to face without the structures of family demands . I see friendship as the glue , the base of the new urban society . Novels about friendship , loss and companionship will constitute part of the new narrative . As friendships turn vintage , there is a nuance , a nostalgia that is attractive . More than selfies and WhatsApp , I think it is the new drama of friendships that will sustain the power of relationships in the future . O ( The writer is professor , Jindal Global Law School , and director , Centre for the Study of Knowledge Systems , OP Jindal Global University .)
40 OUTLOOK 26 February 2018