Photographs

It was at last a Saturday night and as I lay on my bed, tired of all the hard work I had put into the day’s work, I couldn’t help but marvel at the limitless possibilities that it brought with it. I was in a city which I had inhabited for 4 glorious years of engineering and I didn’t have to wake up the next morning to join the hubbub of my new job environment. And yet, as most such occasions go, the plans hadn’t quite worked themselves out and I was sitting on my bed wondering about those few roads not taken and reminiscing how wonderful my Saturdays used to be in what now seems like an erstwhile life.

As I sat there in my lonely room of the swanky new guest house I had just started living in, I decided to start poking around the furniture lying around in the basement of the building. There were a few large cupboards stacked haphazardly around in the basement and I found a few of the drawers unlocked. I found a bunch of old family albums in there. Naturally, I started looking through them. The first one I picked up was a wedding album. I immediately deduced that the wedding had happened in the early 80’s and it was a bong wedding. I kept looking through the albums one after the other, the wedding pictures gave way to the birth of their first girl child then her achievements as she grew up, then the arrival of a baby boy, the photo of a proud father with his son holding a trophy of some sort, the graduations and finally the more recent ones of the wedding of their daughter.

By the time I put away the last album, I realized that I had spent more than an hour looking at pictures of complete strangers. Even though I felt a little guilty about invading someone’s privacy, I couldn’t help but feel a sort of connection to those people in the photographs. I started to feel a wave of nostalgia washing over me and I began to draw similarities with my own family albums. In fact I could remember a few of the same exact photos from my family as I had just seen. Here I was sitting in a barely lit room, soaking in my sweat and yet I wanted to sit there and contemplate how my life has been.

As I returned to my room, I wondered how the recent technological changes have affected our lives today. I remember an incident from a few days ago when my mother asked me to go to the nearest studio and get some photos in a USB printed out and I told her what a waste of money that whole exercise was since we already has the digital prints. Today with the advent of smartphones, digital cameras have become accessible to each and every one. Just click it and store it in your hard drive. We keep increasing the size of our photos folders and keep snapping away, but how many times do we really open that folder and look at the old photos stored there? And even when we do, we don’t really get washed over with nostalgia. And if by some technical error, if the hard disk crashes and you lose all your photos, you fret over it for like an hour and then you move on after promising yourself to keep the backup next time. I remember what a catastrophe it used to be in our household when just one picture went missing.

I believe that even though the digitization of photographic process has greatly benefitted us in terms of convenience and accessibility, they have inexplicably managed to drastically diminish the feelings attached to said photographs. They have managed to transform memories stored in our minds into megabytes.

I just visited the life of a family in just above an hour, I felt their joys with them, I was part of their important milestones, and yet I don’t even know their names, nor do I have the inclination to ever try to know them. And today I sleep with the nebulous question looming large in my subconscious: does the photographs on my computer and my mobile phone really do justice to the incredible life I have lived so far?