From pubs to old books, from culture to heritage, the ordinary life smells unique as of being lost in the danger of it. Whoosh – the rush of emotions and memories that spring into your mind. The power to trigger emotions and the memories connected gives the signal to our sense of smell. We breathe in and inhale smell connecting to various moods.
The background scents of our lives keep changing all the time. It’s a facet of our heritage that keeps changing. Literature, rituals, traditions, and the economy spanning a period of 3,500 years from the Hittite, Ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, to the Byzantine and Ottoman empires relates smell as an ancient smell.
Unique scents
The human point of view on preserving smell for the future depends on many factors which are important; just as a leather-bound book pulled out from a wooden shelf releases the dust on leaving a unique smell filling the nose. UNESCO adopted a convention to safeguard social practices, oral traditions, and performing arts to preserve the culture. Like a bowl of hot water with few drops of essential oils from various flowers and plants.
Heritage scents
Efforts to recognise the value of the odours specifies that sometimes in the layman’s everyday sense of flavour it is important to combine their ideas into one scent memory. In an open exhibition in Istanbul entitled ‘Scents and the City’, explored the years old civilisation through its smells. There is a way of inscribing the events specifying the sense of smells into world heritage lists. So, it is part of a whole intangible heritage world.
Arbitrary scents
Aromatherapy isn’t the only tool to boost productiveness and grow in business. Wish it may be one. In some cases, it might only be concerned with a scent when it is a warning sign that something is deteriorating – the smell of rotting organic matter or decay. While we are still in the womb, the arbitrary paring of any odour leads to the formation of any preferences. By the token, the child then learns to be familiar with the mother’s breast milk with no initial preference, thereby, developing the bonds of preferring the cuddling. Therefore, both meaningful and serendipitous odours are acquired and have meaning through experience.
Nostalgic scents
Shampoo smell or a smell of a laundry detergent brings up powerful emotions or memories. But occasionally, these regional or seasoned smells may cause memories to flood our brains. A bar of soap or a perfume bottle or for that matter lemon or mango pickle in the jar associates some memory. Not just an old memory of words or photographs or videos, but specifying you or family or any object.
We know we can capture a scent in a jar, but can we capture a memory? And not just any old memory composed of words or photos or videos, a scented memory that is specific to you and your family during the winter season. It’s time to find out.
Jashan Jot Kaur is a researcher at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana.
