media, information, the contemporary

Author: Abhija Ghosh


  • Media Encounters of the Nineties Romantic Song

    This is the fourth and final research note from Abhija Ghosh, one of the short-term social media research fellows at The Sarai Programme.

    “I’m a child of the nineties. An era when Rahul Roy was the country’s biggest superstar for a while…I’ve also lived through a time when the average person’s only contact with the outside universe was through newspapers, the radio and one channel on the telly- a channel that you couldn’t even watch unless you went to your balcony and repositioned its antenna every now and then.”[1]

  • From Popular to Viral: The HAHK-DDLJ Media Swirl

    This is the third research note from Abhija Ghosh, one of the short-term social media research fellows at The Sarai Programme. In mid 2014, a range of online film news content focused on two big blockbuster family romances of the nineties, Hum Aapke Hain Koun and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, marking twenty years since their…

  • Streaming Nostalgia: Listening to Nineties Film Music Online

    This is the second research note from Abhija Ghosh, one of the short-term social media research fellows at The Sarai Programme. The reactivation of nineties Hindi cinema in public memory through several media processes, despite its reputation of being the culturally bad object, consistently critiqued for its aesthetic values, repetitive genre conventions and maudlin romantic…

  • Afterlife of the Nineties Romantic Film Song in the Virtual Public Sphere

    In this post, Abhija Ghosh, one of the researchers who received the Social Media Research grant for 2015, introduces her proposed work.

    In this project, I am interested in observing the popularity of nineties romantic cinema and music across several internet media streams such as video sharing platforms, online radio music channels, nineties fan sites and lists in order to map the registers of popular memory, affect and pleasure that mark an emerging cultural afterlife of this decade of Hindi cinema. Social media fan pages like All About 90s evoke cultural associations with the decade by regularly alluding to nineties media forms such as cassettes, video tapes and their object lives, or television broadcasts and their aesthetic convention, however it is the nineties romantic film song that seems to occupy a special space of nostalgia in the collective memory of such internet communities.