Cheesecloth monstrosities and charpais

At times - heck, most times —I see something and my response is a line out of Meera Syal’s excellent, excellent Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. Like the scene when one of the socialities - Laila — takes in an ethnic/rustic-themed bar and says “It’s just that they’re going too far now. I mean soon it will go full circle. We will be over here travelling by rickshaw, wearing some awful cheesecloth monstrosity, and the Indian villagers will all look like people from American soap operas.”

I often think of this when I see this (to me, strange) trend of expat desis posting series of images about life back home (which looks like some over-the-top Sabyasachi ad), or the ad campaigns of Generation (fraught with nostalgia/references to the past). It feels oddly at par with reality: the villages on the internet are not just places of pastoral scenes but also the hub of TikTok videos, or cooking lessons, or creativity, or change. It is almost as if urban folk can’t imagine that what they imagine to be old - and therefore good - was bad, and that the places that must be heralded - the brick roofs, the charpai - are what we would all like to return to, not escape.