Nostalgia is most definitely a seductive liar. It places a rose-tinted glass over your eyes, and then coaxes you to view past without hard feelings. The result — we end up feeling wistful things that we weren’t so crazy about the first time around. But when 27-year-old, Vinayak Razdan chanced upon a tattered copy of a 1972 edition of the Reader’s Digest at his relatives place, the word nostalgia acquired a new meaning for him. “I flipped through its pages and found myself staring at a very young kohl eyed Zeenat Aman endorsing Taj Mahal tea in a purple salwar-suit, her hair - a pair of pigtails. It was a discovery. I stashed away the magazine,” says Razdan.

Razdan, was not even born in 1972, his connect with the popular culture of the 1970s was only through television and films, yet he talks about a young Zeenat Aman and the print ad with the tenderness and the authority of a veteran. “In a way all of us are fond of the past, no matter how remote it is,” he says.

Years later, after discovering the world of blogging, Razdan thought of sharing that joy of discovery with other people. And 8ate.blogspot.com was born. “It’s a vintage ad archive of sorts. Most of the ads that I have put up there are from that particular 1972 edition of Reader’s Digest. Some of the Ads are from an old issue of that great magazine Target. Then there are some from online archives of old magazines. And some old Advertising Management books and magazines that I stole from elder cousins,” chuckles Razdan.

For fellow blogger Soumyadip Choudhury, however, the connect was more immediate. “While the blog began as a medium for unbridled personal expression, my  interest in advertising coupled with the absence of a free collection of vintage Indian ads prompted me to fill in the void,” says the media professional. The “void” was filled with an innovatively titled blog, Cutting the Chai (soumyadip.blogspot.com), which boasts of a vast depository of Indian print ads with sub-sections such as ‘Sexy Indian Ads’ and ‘Rubbers of India’ (condom print ads).

A young Lisa Ray pouts to the camera in a Vivaldi shirt, while Madhu Sapre and Milind Soman smoulder in the buff. Soumyadip’s archive, it seems is partial to the 1980s and early 1990s. “While most of the ads on my blog may seem to be from that era, it isn’t necessarily limited to that time. There are even ads from the 19th century. There reason why there are more ads from 1980s and the 1990s is perhaps because I was growing up with the ads and relate better to them. Moreover, my personal collection of magazines and other sources of ads are also from that period,” says Soumyadip. And then of course there is the condom ad archive. “It essentially began with one single mega post on Indian condoms (Rubbers of India). That post was immensely popular and got featured in blogs (still does) from around the world. People then started to send me inputs about condom stories and ads and I then developed it into a complete category. I also discovered that Indian advertising is quite hot, but then no one had actually put them all together at one place. So began the category - Sexy Indian Ads,” says Soumyadip.