Photographs: Windows to a soulful past

We were not very financially capable but still, since my birth they gave me those photographs as a memory for me to look upon my past.

"You want to know how your first Birthday was celebrated?", said my Mom before placing those beautiful pictures of mine with my family in front of me.

As I grew up I don't know how my maternal uncles got hold of a camera (that old one, which needed a reel to work). They must have bought it borrowing some amount from here and there. And all this happened just to capture my childhood for I was the newest and first little member in their family. From the age that I remember ( may be I was as young as 6-7 years of age) those photographs were the only time when they all used to come up together and pose, the cutest family ever. One of my Uncles was so fond of clicking photographs and even get it clicked that he used to wear all sorts of stylish  (self-made) accessories and even spectacles for that matter before getting a picture clicked. I still remember his funny and yet adorable clicks.

And how I remember such minute details of a time nearly 15 years back? Through those photographs that my family left for me to relive my past. The time I look at any one of them, you will find me lost in imagining the previous and the later scenes of that moment that was lying captured in front of me. I sort of relive that moment with all of them in the same ambiance that existed in my village 15 years back, the ambiance which is lost somewhere in wake of modernization and industrialization. That joint family which is no more "joint" for people were to leave for work and got settled in different cities of the country. So the only way to feel the presence of my loved ones "always" around me at this point of time is by hopping into my past through these pictures.

Understanding this from my kid-hood I developed a habit of capturing every moment of mine in my phone's camera right from the day I received a phone from my Dad (that was the day I joined my Graduation). Then I met the best self-chosen relationship of life, that is, Friends. I somewhere knew that we tend to loose these gems in the run of life as we go ahead, hence I never missed grasping any special moment of our lives in my camera. Those pearls (I do not have enough words to denote them, every adjective is incomplete) are my life. This is not an adolescent attachment towards friends, but my sincere love and gratefulness towards them. This love and belongingness overflows from the photographs that we have, it depicts our journey to the most difficult phase of life.

Today we are far away from each other, in different corners of the country but still our journey is jailed in my laptop and in my heart.

If you love someone, these photographs would help to keep them in your memories even when they are not by your side every time. Memories are precious. Ask me, they have served me happiness several times!

This beautiful life surely needs a window to re-visit and relive our soulful past!