The man who rewinds time: Breathing new life into old memories

Mr Krishna is a freelance photographer and videographer who repairs and digitises VHS tapes on the side, after teaching himself how to do so from YouTube videos and the internet.

When he first put up his services on Carousell in 2019, he had few customers.

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic and – whether people were seeking refuge from the dismal mood or they had time on their hands to spring-clean – Mr Krishna’s business boomed.

He now has a steady flow of customers – at any given time, up to 60 tapes are stashed under his desk in plastic bags awaiting restoration.

He charges between $30 and $60 for each tape, but, really, who can put a price on the memories revived?

Although Mr Krishna is unrelated to his customers, watching the restored footage sometimes lets him travel back in time with them.

Like when he sees the faint resemblance between his clients in person and their younger selves in the tapes – it always moves him.

“You know when you watch a movie, and you see a character fast-forward through time? I can literally see it. This is all real. All these fleeting moments,” Mr Krishna said.

He has experienced the same kind of time-travelling himself, having restored his own home movies, which he began making at the age of 18 when his mother, Madam Mani Megalai, gave him his first camcorder in 1997.

Personal tragedy struck in 2023 when he and his mother were travelling in Tamil Nadu, their first overseas trip together. She died suddenly at the age of 63 due to a swelling in her throat that blocked her airways.

The grief was too much to bear, and the following year, Mr Krishna considered quitting the tape restoration business.

But many of his customers, who are grateful to him for helping them reclaim their memories, helped to change his mind.

Among them was Mr Joel Seet, who lost his mother to cancer a month before Mr Krishna’s mother died.

The two men bonded over their shared grief as Mr Krishna cleaned and digitised the home video tapes that Mr Seet brought to him.

Watching old home videos is “nostalgic and nice until you lose someone very close”, said Mr Krishna.

“I thought I knew death… but it’s a whole new thing, and (the memories) become more valuable. The full gravity of this work of repairing VHS tapes came to me only after (my mother died).”

Thanks to Mr Krishna, Mr Seet, 37, a financial adviser, can still hear his mother’s gentle voice coaxing him to sing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star when he was one year old – a memory that was caught on tape when she filmed it with a camcorder.

This moment is among the dozens of hours of footage found on almost 30 tapes that Mr Krishna converted into digital format.

For Mr Seet, hearing his mother’s voice reminds him that she did not always sound like she did in the last stages of her life, after she had a surgical procedure to treat skin cancer which affected her voice.

She died in 2023 after a five-year battle with the illness.

“I’d never seen that (video) before. There was no photo of it… It’s just one person, me alone (with my mum) – different from most tapes that show big family gatherings,” said Mr Seet.

He feels “just very happy to have good memories” when he watches the video.

“We (usually) recall our parents and those older than us in ways that we can remember, but there’s so much more we don’t (remember) – the tapes help me appreciate her so much more in that way.”

When Mr Sandeep Pawaskar’s son Om was 11 years old, he showed the boy a video recording of a key moment of his life.

It was not a video of his wedding. Nor was it a recording of the birth of Om, now 13 years old.

The video in question captures the time Mr Sandeep appeared on national television in India when he took part in popular game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, hosted by Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan.

“Stage fear aside, to be in front of Mr Amitabh Bachchan itself was very frightening. He is, I think, six foot four. It was a wow moment,” said Mr Sandeep, now a 45-year-old IT programme manager in Singapore.

The tape, which one of Mr Sandeep’s friends had recorded when the episode aired, had been accumulating mould on a shelf in India before Mr Krishna restored it.

Mr Sandeep snagged a spot on the game show as a 21-year-old university student when he took part in a contest found in a code wrapped in a packet of biscuits.

During his 15 minutes of fame on TV, he correctly answered six out of 15 questions and won 10,000 rupees, which could cover two and a half years of his college tuition fees in India.

“The show did help me on the monetary level at that point of time,” Mr Sandeep said.

The bonus came more than two decades later – his son, who has been raised on a diet of Bollywood movies, thinks his father is pretty cool to have shared the same stage as Mr Bachchan.

Ms Tanya Tan’s final memory of her mother while the older woman was still alive remains one of her biggest regrets in life, she says.

In 2011, when her mother was on her deathbed after a four-and-a-half-year fight with breast cancer, Ms Tan’s maternal grandmother asked if she wanted to say her last farewell.

Ms Tan, then 14, innocently held back, thinking her mother would hang on for as long as she did not say her last words.

Sadly, her mother died before Ms Tan could say goodbye.

Ms Tan, now a 28-year-old legal counsel, first chanced upon the tapes of her family’s home videos in 2018 and finally got around to seeking Mr Krishna’s help in restoring them in 2024, before her mother’s 13th death anniversary.

For her, retrieving the memories is like “saying hello again to the dead”.

In the home videos, Ms Tan was around one year old, so she has no recollection of those times.

But when she first watched the tapes, she broke down.

The recordings are a treasure trove of memories of two people whom she was very close to and who are no longer with her – her mother and maternal grandmother, who died in 2016.

"When I look at them (the tapes), I see how much love and care I had from all the people who raised me – it’s almost like a reflection and remembrance of how far I’ve come,” Ms Tan said.

“It’s like opening a present… you never know what you’re going to get, with all of these memories that have happened in your life.”

Mr Muhammad Zaki Saifee is the youngest of five children – but growing up, he never felt pampered like a “golden child”.

In fact, at six years old, he became an uncle when his oldest sister gave birth, and from a young age, he would help take care of his nephew.

With little record of his childhood other than several photos, he remembered being “super quiet” and “the lonely kind of kid” in primary school. He had low self-esteem due to eczema issues and became more sociable only after picking up dance in secondary school.

But he saw a different side of himself in 2024 when his mother passed him video tapes that were recorded by his father between 1999 and 2001. The recordings, which Mr Krishna cleaned up and digitised, showed Mr Zaki as a cheerful, bubbly child with his siblings at home and on family outings.

“It was like discovering myself when I was a kid – I realised I was so cheerful last time… I want to find myself again,” said the 28-year-old product consultant.

“I think it (the tapes) assured me that I was happy as a kid. I had always thought I wasn’t happy – so it’s good to know that I was cared for and loved by my parents and my family.”

Mr S. Sathiskumar, 45, a business owner, says he grew up in front of the camera, quite literally – after all, his father was the “video guy” of the family.

Mr D. Sathiyanandan, 75, would meticulously record the birthday celebrations of his three children and various family functions, and later make copies of the tapes for relatives.

During extended family gatherings of up to 60 people at his five-room flat in Yishun, Mr Sathiyanandan would screen family videos on the television.

“Any time we played the old tapes, there would be excitement – people usually came to the function for that,” Mr Sathiskumar said.

Though he does not recall much about his childhood, he is grateful to his father for recording those moments, as he sees the love and attention he received as a child.

He now does the same for his three daughters, aged 20, 14 and 10, documenting their milestones on his mobile phone.

“When they get older, they will definitely forget what happened. But I’ve done a YouTube recap, so if I play it 20 years later, it will still be there,” he said.

Photojournalist Taryn Ng chose to project cherished scenes from repaired VHS tapes, creating a way for her profiles to step back into the moments they thought were lost to time.