Un-Spiderman!

I have grown up to believe that what distinguishes humans from other animals apart from the magical tool called language is a higher form of memory called nostalgia. This is not like the dog that salivates on remembering food or the predator recalling an effective way to trap prey. Nostalgia in the dictionary has to have an element of sadness at the fact that one is distant in time and place, but what the dictionary does not capture is the fact that this distance also endears one to people and events one wanted to forget in the past. Nostalgia has this divine effect that lets one forget cruelties and forgive trespasses. It lets one come to terms with one's past by providing a perspective that no one or nothing else can give. It lets one step back to a distant time and place and have a bird's-eye view, instead of the more common worm's-eye view. On one hand it lets one hold on to the innocent time when "the world hardly existed beyond the garden-gate" (Robert Lynd in "The Hum of Insects") and on the other it lets one realise that the mountains one made out of molehills were merely a result of emotional myopia!

I revel in nostalgia, whenever I can, and I unburden myself of the cobwebs in my system! Thanks to the people I met on my way...