Not long ago, I realized I have been holding onto a tiny time machine. I realized this when I once accidentally turned it on! I do not have the user manual for this time machine, but from several instances of such accidental time travel, I now have some idea of how it works.
This time machine is quite primitive — in the way that it does not allow traveling to arbitrary points in time (or at least I have not yet figured out how to do that). But what I have found is that it can take me back to certain checkpoints in time. These checkpoints are not really particular instances in time, but rather intervals that can span anything from an hour to a few weeks.
Inadvertently, I have created several such checkpoints in the past. In the summer of 2023, while working as a summer research intern at CiSTUP1 in IISc, I would often play Forest2 while working in my cubicle, walking back from the office to my hostel, and while working from my room. And when I say this, I mean that I would almost exclusively3 play Forest in that month of summer. This created a checkpoint in time, and now playing Forest activates my time machine and takes me back to that same summer — if I close my eyes, I can easily believe that I am still an intern at CiSTUP. Not just that, but I can also once again feel the emotions of the excitement of walking to my graduate student guide’s cubicle with a working solution, the solitude of an empty campus, the eeriness of not meeting most of my friends for weeks, and the eagerness to start my second year at IISc. This summer, I found myself playing a few selected songs from the album Clancy on a loop while preparing4 food in my apartment during my internship at UIUC. Playing those songs now brings back the image of my apartment, the makeshift taste of my makeshift food, the remoteness of being away from family and friends, and the diminishing uneasiness of being in a totally different place. Similarly, Can’t Help Falling In Love teleports me to my late-night walk around the IISc main building somewhere in the middle of my third semester — when I listened to the song for the first time after quite a while, with a cool night breeze and a dimly lit scenery around me. Ode to Sleep carries me back to the various times in early 2022 when I opened rejection letters from different undergraduate programs abroad5, while Cancer brings back the time when I was at the peak6 of my JEE preparation. There are many more examples, but I think I have made my point.
To be fair, this is not a discovery — I am certain that many of you have had similar nostalgic experiences. Further, music is not the only thing that can bring about travel through time — odors, tastes, textures, and even sights can do the same. The wonderful thing about music though is that I can choose to play any song of my liking and thus choose the time I want to travel to. I still have to better understand the mechanism of creating checkpoints, particularly how my context and the meaning of the music itself play a role in it. But for now, while I am glad to be able to occasionally travel back in time, I am partly afraid that if I do not diversify my playlist, I will soon run out of songs to create new checkpoints with.
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Center for infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation & Urban Planning. ↩
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By Twenty One Pilots, like the rest of the songs, covers, and albums mentioned in this post. I will henceforth omit mentioning this. I also want to mention here that they are the only band I listen to. ↩
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My sister thinks that this is a weird thing to do. Even my parents are surprised that I do not get bored listening to the same songs again and again. I think I am too lazy to change my playlist, but in order to make this footnote longer, I will cite a poem from my 8th grade English textbook — Unfolding Bud by Naoshi Koriyama — which uses the metaphor of an unfolding bud to describe how the true meaning of a poem (or in my case, a song) can be derived only by reading (or in my case, listening) it multiple times. While I still may not have fully understood the essence of the songs I listen to, I do feel that by doing so I am able to find newer meanings in them. ↩
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I am refraining from the use of the word “cooking” because frankly I mostly either prepared a taco or a burrito from ready-made materials or reheated the home-made Indian food I was fortunate to get home-delivered to me twice every week. Nonetheless, even this was a big deal for me as someone who has never gone past putting water to boil. ↩
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Interesting story for another time! ↩
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The peak of panic, by the way. ↩