Filled, yet void, with the depth of it, unknown - perhaps till the tail-end of memories.
A tradition of sitting down on the floor over a snack or post-food, for viewing physical photos: feeling the photo-sheets those memories were printed on, reading the name of the photo studio where the memories were brought to light & life too, bumping into the negatives from which they were developed and turned into positives. There was this strange redness and sepia tone drunk up by the “negative” rolls, through which we still had the uncanny ability of seeing through the negative.
Photo-viewing sessions were organised by my dear Sundar Chitappa and made fun for all of us cousins. It’s our time to unwind, as well as rewind to the good old times. So much innocence that meets the eye through these photographs, where no grand posing happened. Although some of them were planned pics, they’d come out to be as candid.
And then struck a void, which began striking in regular intervals. A filled home, dwindling in numbers, in a steady fashion: what used to be a joint exercise of viewing pictures, started turning into a solitary activity - with me just clicking a picture off of a picture, so that I could share it in turn. Somehow, to me, eventhough I click these pics from the physical photos, the memory associated with the original picture remains etched, even without having to be reminded by artificial intelligence. The voices of the people present in the picture rings heavily in my head as they leave a void in the room, with some of my brothers just hanging there up in the wall of the room, in a mere photo-frame, for they’re resting up there in their heavenly abode.
Today, The phone and social media do the reminding - This Day, Last Year, for us to be transported back to the thought. How sad, isn’t it? We tend to reduce the capacity of our own thinking and ability of remembering, just because of dependency on this gadget called - mobile phone.
