Smaller than Life
Why a blog? Simple. Cacoethes Scribendi -- the urge to write! My literary pretensions and caprices bring me here. Like any writer I write to be read. All my posts, though fettered to my small world and trivially myopic, will live and yearn that somebody connects to them someday. Cognitive frenzies, sardonic musings, aimless banters, incoherent ramblings and trivial indulgences; this is simply an episodic narrative of my trivial world -- in a grain of sand… Smaller than Life.

Graffiti

When I am dead,
I hope it is said,
'His sins were scarlet,
but his books were read'.

- Hillaire Belloc

This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me, --
The simple news that Nature told
With tender majesty.

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

- Emily Dickinson

The thoughts of our past years
          in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction

- William Wordsworth

Friday, August 19, 2005
 
Optical Illusions

"It has been so long, kanna, that I am beginning to forget what you used to look like," my mother tells me when I call her up these days, "Why don't you email me some of your more recent photographs?" And she, like all of us, lives looking for warmth in frozen images from the past. Drawing comfort in reinforcing old impressions, created long ago. When reality has much blotted the images of the photographs: roads are narrower; buildings, higher; the air, blacker; and people, much different. But today needs to freeze into pictures, like yesterday did. And we click photographs. One by the huge auditorium, in front of the waterfalls, with exotic species of birds, and one with bright colours of Fall decadence, one with him, and another with her. "Can you click a picture of us, please? Thank you." For, all the fall hues dotting the kaleidoscope, captured into baroque frames, will wait and hope that the next fall is much alike. And we pose, hiding the wrinkles, the receding hairline, careful enough to smile the right amount, stopping the inevitable for a moment -- it should look good in posterity. Though people will have changed. Trees will have been cut. He will no longer smile at you that compassionate smile. She will have run out of love for you. And times will have changed. But it does not matter. What we need is an anti-reality check, when reality will stare at us like the afternoon sun, and we will be too blinded to peer anymore. So we stare at the photographs, once again. The colours in the parchment will not fade like before, wearied by our stares, for they are immaculately stored into email attachments. And the past is rosier, digitally enhanced.

So, in response, I assure my mother, "Okay Ma. I will send you some photographs I clicked during X's visit." And I take photographs every now and then. One by the lake, and one by the trees. And remember to pose well. Lest the smile not belie something else.



Comments via Blogger:

Too good....!!
Your writing style is characterstically very rich...!!

Hey, thanks man! :)

Awesome post man. So well put something which is so true. Keep it up.

Thanks, Aditya!

I have been enjoying this particular post of yours for quite some months now! This piece of yours is extremely wonderful!

dileee,

I am not sure, your stlye has changed..looks like it has, to me! i am reading ur blog after a LLLONNGGG time, this one isss lovely!!! invigorates endearing moments from half the world across! i only hope, i dont become one of those mothers, sending my kid not knowing to the land of what!!! definitely not to miss, living with photographs!!!

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