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When India started to have its digital boom a few years ago, it was evident that nostalgia baiting was a sure-fire formula to engage people. The 90s kids liked to believe that the era before the smartphones where they wrote ‘surfing the net’ as a hobby in ‘slambooks’ was infinitely better than whatever life they were living now. Not realising that they were turning into their grandparents who started every sentence with ‘humare zamane mein’, they started reliving their past by tagging their peers on Buzzfeed articles. Their nostalgia was currency, and films and TV shows were quick to convert it into content. But nostalgia was never just about playing Kumar Sanu songs or appreciating the simplicity of a landline phone, it was about a time in life when things felt simpler, easier. Of course, it’s not like there weren’t real-life worries in the good old days, but those worries now seem like a speck in the past. It is this sense of loving and living in the past that Gullak has evoked every season. Even though it is set in present times, it presents itself like a time capsule for an era that you long for, when life was easier.
Gullak introduces its sepia-stained world like an old memory book where the fragile pages must be turned over delicately. Here, the Mishras’ family of four lives a rather simple life, or at least that’s how we perceive it. The idea that a teenage boy is lying to his parents just so he can go to a coffee shop with a few female friends, or the family cleaning up decades of junk inside their house evokes a certain sense of nostalgia in us and not because these are exactly our memories of our childhood. But because these problems feel solvable in a world where we see our problems as somewhat existential. Gullak speaks about that existentialism through its narrator, the actual ‘gullak’, but waters down those concepts in a Panchatantra-like fashion.
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Like the episode where the Mishra family calls a ‘raddi vala’ and cleans up the extra junk that’s housed in their home, we see each character holding on to a piece of their past that once defined them. Or the episode where someone snatches Shanti’s gold chain off of her neck, we walk away watching a family being united in times of crisis, and getting over this hiccup with a plate of ‘chaat’, as if the accident is already a thing of the past.
Even when siblings fight with each other in this house, and a well-prepared meal goes to waste, one knows that this isn’t the end of their world. You almost instantly forget what they are fighting about because like most fights between family members, this isn’t an ideological conflict, but a personal struggle that has found an outlet. Dealing with a rude boss or a nosey neighbour isn’t particularly nostalgic as such but remembering how you stood up to that mean boss or how that nosey neighbour was just the most hilarious comic break in your life makes for a good story in hindsight. Gullak realises that, and takes you back to a place where the not-so-great moments of the past could be looked at with a different lens.
So when Santosh Mishra, in this season, announces that its time to move on from their house and the life they have always known, it comes as a rude shock to the other family members and the audience as well, because this show offers the comfort of ‘daal-chawal’, something that instantly takes you back to your childhood and continues to be just as comforting. If the Mishras leave their house with that ‘aangan’ where the staircase leads to a terrace, it isn’t just them bidding adieu to their memories, but us saying goodbye to the memories that we relive while watching this show.
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