Click, save, FORGET…

Enter Smartphone, Instagram…
Exit(Extinct) Camera, Photo-album…

It’s a Sunday morning. I lazily plop down on the sofa with the newspaper wondering who’s divorcing whom today!!
However, this Sunday has its mind set on making me blog on a topic that my friends and I often gossip about!
‘Click, save, FORGET’, an article in the Times Life edition, starts with “Has our excessively photographed and filtered lives stopped us from making real memories and connections?”
I wish they’d taken MY opinion too because I strongly believe that today’s youth is obsessed with clicking photos just to garner likes on social media platforms.
Yes yes, I’m very much a part of ‘today’s youth’ but I can proudly announce that I’m NOT a victim infected by this epidemic virus and I never will be.
I swear by memories, I often go down memory lane, I laugh to myself remembering the most trivial day at school, I cry looking at farewell photos. This is how I live my life and so do my friends.
A scene from a Malayalam movie that I watched yesterday, highlighted this issue very beautifully. The father, in one of his emotional moments, hands over to his son his prized possession, a camera, and requests him to capture some beautiful moments of their family outing. The son retorts that the camera being a film-role one would restrict the number of photos to which the father aptly replies “I don’t want hundreds of meaningless photos. Just capture a few memories that I can save in an album and cherish forever.”
That’s what a photograph was meant to do. That’s what a camera was invented for, wasn’t it? Earlier a photograph in a family album triggered a memory. People aren’t making memories anymore! The photos taken with the smartphone(not so smart if you ask me!) show only the mood of the moment and are forgotten soon. Years later I wouldn’t want to see what I’d worn on a particular occasion, what food I’d eaten where and more importantly how many people liked and commented on it!
When I see photos in my album, mind you I have a huge collection, tears of joy come to my eyes because I’m transported to that moment. Thanks to the photo I got a chance to relive that memory. Isn’t that what we all want?
Like I told you earlier, three of my school friends and I went for the movie last evening. Since it was a late evening show, none of us had time to grab something to eat. What started as a saying-goodbye moment turned into a movie of memories on 32x fast-forward mode. Before one completed his episode, the other took the thread and linked it to another episode. An onlooker would have stopped to wonder what this animated session was all about! You think we have photos of all those years at school? Nope, none. But our minds have, our hearts have. The photos were taken in there.
I’m not saying one should eternally be stuck in the dinosaur-age (yes, I am, so I have been told) but DON’T let technology rule your life. Our minds are way superior to phones and what do you know, with minds we don’t even have to ask each other “Aye, what’s your internal storage capacity”!!!