Of moments: Fleeting, lived and captured
Afew months ago, I had the privilege of watching a theatre performance of thespian Naseeruddin Shah. He was accompanied by his wife and daughter. The performance was based on an assortment of short stories of Urdu author Ismat Chugtai. That the trio would weave magic was a foregone conclusion. But much to the chagrin of the thespian and despite his appeals, a section of the audience could not resist the temptation of consistently clicking pictures of the performance. This conduct left a bad taste.
I come from a small town and it is only on some rare occasion that we are graced by a celebrity. We can’t boast of regular events to break our humdrum routine. So probably that explains our excitement to capture even the most trivial moments. But that may not be the most probable explanation. The malady afflicts people in big cities as much as in smaller towns.
We have evolved into an age where a camera accompanies us like a shadow. Even in such an evolved age, a persistent poser that knocks our minds is: What is life? We all have a multitude of replies to this pestering question. One of the most pensive replies my mind gives is that life is an integration of fleeting moments. Fleeting being the key word. Probably that explains our inherent desire to capture every moment.
But if we contemplate on the subject we might infer what we are sacrificing at the cost of capturing every moment on camera. We often fail to realise how we tend to lose the essence of a moment in our intense desire to capture it. Moments meant to be lived to their fullest are frittered away in the flash of a camera.
If we go back a couple of decades when photography was at a nascent stage vis-à-vis today’s evolved technology, we’ll realise how things were different back then.
Getting photographed was an event in itself. The events that were commonly captured were weddings, birthdays and a few more such occasions. Photographs were painstakingly developed and neatly stacked in albums and rested in family archives. Occasionally, they were glanced at to relive those occasions and special moments.
Juxtapose this scenario with the present when we keep accumulating pictures of all and sundry moments on our devices that eventually never get developed as hard copies and end up as digital trash. Occasionally, they are lost to the corrupted memory of our devices never to be retrieved.
But to take the talk further, the loss is not just individual but cumulative. We might have missed the symphony of a musical performance, the sound of the rivulet on our holiday, the essence of mellifluous ‘lavans’ at a wedding, the radiance of our child’s smile that peaked only for a fraction of a second in our frenzy of capturing such moments. The list is endless.
In all this melee of capturing the moment, we fail to take a note of the camera that is so inherent in each one of us. Poet William Wordsworth refers to the ‘inward eye’ with which he captures ten thousand daffodils in a single glance.
The poet delves into this ‘inward eye’ in solitude and enlivens those captured moments blissfully.
The absence of a digital camera only enhances his experience of living the moment to its fullest. May be, we need to take a cue from the poet and enhance our momentary experiences.
WE TEND TO LOSE THE ESSENCE OF A MOMENT IN OUR INTENSE DESIRE TO CAPTURE IT