Nostalgia in academia is not sentimental fluff.

It is the emotional backbone of the entire academic ecosystem — the invisible thread tying faculty, students, alumni, corridors, libraries, and memories across decades.

It arrives quietly, always unannounced, often in the softest moments.

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Scene 1: IIT Campus — Early Morning Walk

A retired professor, still living in the faculty quarters, watches young students rushing to class with backpacks bouncing against their shoulders.

He whispers to himself,

“This energy… this chaos… this noise…

I have lived inside it for forty years.”

He smiles.

Not because he misses teaching, but because he misses the feeling of being surrounded by minds just beginning to wake up to the world.

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Scene 2: Oxford — High Table Dinner

A literature professor tells her new cohort of students,

“You know, I still remember my first tutorial — trembling, terrified, and yet so alive.”

She laughs softly.

“Nothing compares to the first time a student challenges you with a question you can’t answer.”

That moment, she says, is the true induction into academia — the day you realise teaching is actually learning in disguise.

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Scene 3: A Small Indian Government College — Alumni Day

A retired physics teacher, wearing a slightly faded Nehru jacket, stands on stage.

A group of former students — now engineers, entrepreneurs, homemakers, officers — come running up to touch his feet.

He wipes tears behind his spectacles.

Not because of respect.

Because they remembered.

Because memory is the only certificate that truly matters in teaching.

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Scene 4: Stanford Campus — Professor & Former PhD Student Reunion

A former student, now a celebrated machine learning researcher, meets his old guide after a decade.

“You changed my life,” he says.

The professor shakes his head,

“No. I only gave you a map.

You found the road.”

This is nostalgia at its purest — the shared ownership of a journey neither fully controlled.

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Scene 5: Staff Room at 4:30 PM — Anywhere in the World

Someone opens an old cupboard and finds yellowing attendance registers from the 90s.

A young lecturer jokes,

“Sir, attendance was hand-written?”

The senior professor laughs,

“Beta, even emotions were hand-written back then.”

Laughter fills the room — warm, innocent, healing.

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What Exactly Is This Nostalgia?

It is the longing for:

• a time when students listened more than they scrolled

• a syllabus that lasted longer than an update cycle

• classrooms where curiosity was louder than complaints

• years when teachers were trusted, not audited

• batches that still write emails saying, “Sir, I got promoted”

• corridors filled with laughter, not anxiety

• teachers who had time to think, read, breathe

• students who had time to dream, not hustle

• institutions that cared more about learning than ranking

Nostalgia is not delusion.

It is memory fighting bureaucracy.

It is the academic heart remembering why it chose this life in the first place.

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The Deep Truth About Academic Nostalgia

A professor from Columbia once told a colleague from IIM:

“We romanticise the past…

not because it was perfect,

but because it was ours.”

And the colleague replied,

“The past wasn’t better — it was slower…

and slow is where thinking lives.”

That’s the real nostalgia — not for old buildings or old policies,

but for old time — when learning had space to breathe.

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And The Hope Hidden Inside Nostalgia

Despite the frustrations, the blind spots, the bureaucracy…

academics still think of “their students,”

“their campus,”

“their batches,”

“their old colleagues,”

“their first lecture,”

“their favourite thesis,”

and feel something warm inside.

It is this nostalgia — gentle, persistent, beautiful —

that keeps them going even when everything else feels heavy.

As one professor from JNU once whispered during a reunion:

“Teaching is the only job where you fall in love with new generations every year.”

That line…

that feeling…

that ache…

That is The Nostalgia.