Photos and Blogs

Some people like to see family photo albums, and some people have albums thrust upon them. As far as Im concerned, if I've seen one pic of your cute nephew, I've seen them all. Ive seen one pic of you getting married, Ive seen them all. Ive seen one pic of your ajji turning 80, Ive seen them all. But somehow I have always found myself, from a very young age, sitting on peoples drawing room sofas, with one massive album balanced open on my lap, and about seventeen more stacked next to me. And the people of the house are giving me helpful footnotes like: thats my nephew Pappu being potty-trained. Or theyre providing me minute and excruciating details about the sari, jewellery and make-up of a bride who is their uncles sons sister-in-laws cousins new wife. Small arguments may break out even: one person says, array no tanchoi she was wearing at the reception; paithani was for the main wedding. While this is being sorted out, you have to stay on that leaf of the album, while a small voice inside you is saying whocareswhocareswhocareswhocares or nextnextnext. Its the most meaningless when you have attended the occasion in question. You were there. Now why do you need photographic evidence that it happened? As I grew, I became better and better at adroitly turning three pages at a time when no one was looking, so that you could skip along at a pace that ensured that you could tunnel through the other seventeen albums fast and get home before dark.

Then came the video cameras. There was no skipping anything there. You had to sit through hours of shaky camera work and bad sound, while admiring someone marrying/graduating/bringing baby home, and a whole lot of other rites of passage. Again, Ive seen one shot of your kid in a black gown on the lawns of an American University, Ive seen them all I dont need 2 hours of footage to get the point, much as I love and admire your kid.

(The only amateur video I have hugely enjoyed is one taken circa 1968 by neighbours who went to Africa. When they returned they projected the stuff they had filmed on a blank wall at home, and we would eat roast beef laid over crusty, well-soured Mumbai bread cut in thick slices, and drink a fizzy raspberry drink whose name will come back to me tomorrow, after this piece has gone into the innards of the printing process. The highlight for us eight-year-olds then, was the part when a rhino pee-ed copiously and noisily for a good 40 seconds of film time. The rewind mechanism was unknown then, and we would happily sit through the entire film again just to get to the incontinent rhino part. But I digress.)

Then came the urls. You asked someone about their holiday or their daughter, and youd get an email or be told online: go to www.see3000picsofmyvacation or www.seemykidgrow. This was the least troublesome, because how much of it you saw was between you and your computer, and you could click randomly to get the basic picture, and exit.

Today, the new menace is blogs. For some people, they have replaced the here-are-endless-photographs-of-my-shaadi-from-every-angle. With photos and home videos, at least there is an occasion, trip, something around which somebody has gone mad with a camera. With blogs, you can now be locked into reading the outpourings of someone stuck in a city theyre unhappy with, in a job (or lack of one) that they hate, or with a child whose antics are cute but not something to be necessarily documented for posterity and the world at largein short just leading their lives, but for some reason turning them over into the public domain, and insisting that you stay abreast, every week. So now you have to get on to the Net, go to their blog, and read all about how little Neha threw the mobile in the pot and pulled the flush, and how many exact dollars and cents it costs in Singapore to have a plumber fish out the mobile. (Part of you is wanting to ask a technical question about whether the mobile survived the ordeal and is now yukkily back in active service.) Its one of those stories that no doubt is very funny if you were there, but loses something in the telling. On top of it, the blogger will ask you every week did you read my blog? did you read my blog? And then insist that you comment on the content, style, literary merits (or lack thereof). Yes, there is a novel inside every one of us, but sometimes I think its better that it stays inside.

Ok that was a really nasty crack, and I understand that this kind of thing has some therapeutic value one blogger friend tells me sometimes she can detach from some awful stuff going on in her life because shes thinking how it can be used in next weeks blog. Another says that it is a great way to keep a diary, and let your friends know the ups and downs of your lifebut I dont know. Now I yearn for the days when you could pick three pages of a polythelene photo album together and turn them swiftly when no one was looking.