Memories become more permanent when you look at…

HARISH MONGA

Have you ever thought about what would you like to take along with you if you had to instantly vacate a house or leave the house in any untoward situation?

Hardly anything would come to one’s mind. If all, the young generation has to do, in the present day, he would like to pick up his mobile, charger. While the older ones put their hands on cash, gold, and property deeds. A distant relative also once told me that in an untoward situation, they packed their essential items – passports and documents including those of house title deeds as well as a carton of photographs accumulated over the years.

During my two shifts – one while moving to a rented house, to construct the new house by putting the parental house to ground zero having a construction of more than seven decades old. I disposed of most of the old items, unwanted furniture, and several documents that have no value for me now after retirement but kept a full carton of old family photos – before my birth and after my retirement. With the start of the digital era, no still prints were taken out and the same confined to external hard discs or photo frames.

Though they are nicely preserved one has to attach them to the laptop or computer to view them. While the photos posted in the album – black and white and colored – which started during the year of my marriage in 1975, are a part of our memory, to have a quick look over them.

Photography is such an invention that everyone would like to enjoy his photography. Even some parents pay for professional photographers to take styled shots of newborns curled in womb-like poses in baskets and flowerpots. Some are also clicked by visiting the nearby parks and getting portraits framed up.

The best ones are that were clicked during my theatre work, while posted in the City Beautiful – Chandigarh, in different costumes. Sometimes even now when I look over them, I feel as to how I could do all those different roles – from a one-minute entry on the stage of the doctor’s role to the postman and so on in main character roles with the delivery of dialogues in different pitch and tones.

I also recollect that a few years back, I got prints of around thirty-odd photographs with an idea to put an exhibition on the club meeting which includes – a cat on my typewriter, a mentally-retarded beggar in a stylish dress, a child sleeping with head over the tin etc.

Frankly speaking, memories become more permanent when you look at photos in hard copy, especially when you have problems locating those in external hard drives. I hope the time will come when the advanced computers of tomorrow can read our electronic files of today. Till then, I will keep on printing the best pictures for me to remember so that others to look back and be thankful for the years of life experienced.

Today, with the advent of Smartphones and affordable digital cameras, people are producing so many more photos. Some find their way to social media feeds but not many make the transition to print.

I want to remember all this when my memory starts to fail and my mind becomes hazy. That’s why I prefer to get prints of photographs in hard copy. In this way, the moments become more permanent and I don’t easily forget.