Time travel

The confluence of brands, music, nostalgia, reverse ageing....

A few years ago a Nissan Micra television commercial featured Ranbir Kapoor yodelling on the streets of Mumbai of the yesteryears. His fantasy comes to an end abruptly as the context changes and he is suddenly finds himself scrambling for a parking slot. Na woh purane din wapas aayenge ; na woh khali sadkein (neither will those days return ; nor those empty streets) but thank God for the Micra.

Nostalgia is a tricky emotion for a brand to use in communication. Tricky since it is alluring yet impractical. Quite like ‘snow’ – easy to admire from a distance and difficult to experience first-hand. Its no surprise then that very few brands have been able to leverage this emotion despite knowing how strong a connect it makes with people.

A product that has done a brilliant job of leveraging nostalgia is the SaReGaMa Caravan. Right from the physical product form down to the content, every small detail only works to recreate so perfectly, the experience of listening to music the way we did as children.

In the late 70s / early 80s, there were few electronic devices even in homes in urban India which perhaps makes some of those unforgettable. The radio was one such object of adoration. Perched on a high cabinet to make sure it was away from the reach of little fingers and close enough to a window to catch uninterrupted signals. Its brown exterior often covered by a leather cover cut at just the right places to manipulate the silver buttons. The large silver dial on the top-right, a few other buttons hidden away on its side panel. Ameen Sayani’s unmistakable voice on the Geetmala. The crystal clear sounds of non-digitized musical instruments. The appetite and appreciation it created for a variety of music genres since there was no way of predicting what came next.

The Caravan seems to have captured it all. Right from the sound quality to the retro content and even the random order in which the tracks play recreate the nostalgic experience of listening to music on a radio down to the last detail.

In the 70s a psychologist called Ellen Langer carried out an experiment to understand the effect the physical environment had on the mental thought process of an individual in the context of reversing ageing. In 1979 a group of geriatrics were taken to a retreat for what she called ‘the week of reminiscence’. Everything in that space belong to the 1950s – the furniture, the newspapers and the music. There were no mirrors in that space, the group was not assisted in their everyday chores and were tested on physiological parameters before and after that week. In the interim they spent their time living as though they lived in the 50s – they spoke about events as though those were happening in real time, listening to musical tracks that were popular in the 50s etc. At the end of a week the results astounded everyone when the group had wiped several years of their age tested on physical parameters. The BBC team was so intrigued by the experiment and the results that they decided to follow up the study and later create a documentary reporting their findings. 

For me, the presence of a Caravan in my living room does just that. I time travel effortlessly through the decades and feel like a child again. Enjoying once again the music that MTV and Indie-pop had succeeded in wiping off from my memory in the 90s. And when I learn that it can actively contribute to making me look and feel younger, it’s an affordance that makes the product even more endearing.