AI to give us a scent of the past – Economic Times

Recently a news item caught my eye: there is a project to use artificial intelligence to recreate the smells of Europe of 500 years ago. The idea is to have AI scan all that has been written in that period to gather information related to the description of smells and collate them for a composite scent scape of those times. The team will then collaborate with chemists and perfumers to recreate those smells, to display them at interactive museums and historical sites.

My mind, of course, jumped to Queen Elizabeth Is oft-quoted remark that she bathed only once a month, as also The Great Stink rising from the Thames river in London in 1858. Would Londoners want to be reminded of these glorious incidents from their past, if only to be more grateful for their modern-day bath showers and clean(er) air? Even Europes smells may not be exactly what its current residents want to remember or experience.

That said, the link between smells and memory is deep and universal. There is nothing like a familiar whiff to set off all sorts of thoughts. For me, every place has a smell, as do events. People also have specific smells grandparents and parents, spouses, children, friends, enemies and so on. My mother used to tell me that when I was a toddler, if my father was out of town I would sniff all the pillows till I found one that smelt of him and sleep on that!

While many of my generation write about 4711 the famous Kolnisch Wasser or Eau de Cologne, of which my mother always had a bottlein relation to their female forbears, for me my mother is inextricably linked to sandalwood oil, the only perfume she used throughout her life abroad, confounding men and women alike with that mysterious spicy aroma! And I associate my grandmother with the oddly era-specific aroma of paan and talcum powder.

New cars, new notebooks, new clothes all have special aromas. The Durga Puja I attended in London over 20 years ago did not assuage my homesick heart simply because the venue was not redolent of marigolds, camphor, and coconut coir smoke. Delhi sarkari offices generally smell of badly plumbed toilets and damp airconditioning, and their Calcutta counterparts reek of stale mustard oil. Even pollution smells distinctly different in both. And of course, there is food. Mas and Didas signature dishes, the whiff of heeng and saffron emanating from kachoris and biryanis, the sulphurous goodness of rock salt, the sweet floral bouquet of Bengals short-grained rice, the complex scent of garam masalas many spices and panchphorons five seeds, fermented bamboo shoots and curry leaves each evokes a memory for me.

Yet there is also a timelessness to some smells. The onset of autumn in northern India has always smelt of harsinghar shiuli for Bengalis. The aroma of cool rain on parched soil, so unromantically called petrichor in English, evokes the same emotion today in Indians as it did millennia ago. And agarwoods resinous bouquet is as heady today as during the time of Kalidasa, who wrote of ladies perfuming their tresses with its smoke 1,500 years ago.

But the long olfactory link between past and present is weakening. As we become more urban, globalised and I daresay deracinated, the ancient smells of flowers, wood, resins and the seasons etc are supplanted in collective memory by aromas of perfumes, detergents, pesticides, pollution and other chemical emanations. If the scents of the 21st century are recreated in the 26th century, they may be even less pleasant than those unearthed from the 16th century.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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AI to give us a scent of the past - Economic Times