With apologies to Kodak and the like

Memory can be a strange thing. Sometimes it is a stalker, persistently reminding us of moments we would like to forget; sometimes the kind stranger who covers us with something warm when we are out in the cold; and perhaps sometimes an old friend we can visit for consolation, advice, inspiration, or hope.

What is a photograph but an attempt to capture a memory, to put a colorful bird in a cage, to run into the kind stranger, to give the old friend an address we can always find? And then came lenses, Eastman Kodak, zoom, flash, Polaroid, SLR, digital photography, camera phones, and megapixels. Capturing a photograph has become a hobby, a profession, an art, a passion, and, for some, even an obsession.

But the mind still remains the best camera, the best instrument of photography. There is something one-dimensional about photography. Light is its only tool. Even video recording has a limited arsenal- sound and light. Capturing a true photograph, stuffing a moment or two in time into your pocket, giving physical form to a fragment of memory, requires perception, of the thousands of stimuli and emotions whose complex interplay gives birth to a single moment in our lives, and not merely precise measurement of the physics of light and sound. What was I feeling like when the photograph was taken? What did I smell, hear, or react to? Which emotions were racing through my head and heart? What madness was I just about to be guilty of? These are all questions that cannot be answered in megapixels. The mind captures the moment; the mind captures that infinitesimal yet profound fragment of our insignificant yet confusingly active lives.

In my moments where I want to visit that old friend, I do not flip through albums. I find myself opening little snuff-box-sized boxes of these moments. Where I can feel the crispness and innocence of a blue sky that I once saw; where I am stirred by the deep melancholic sound of ocean waves meeting their eventual fate on a rocky seashore; where I am overpowered by the mystic gloom of the evening fog (smog?) that enveloped the ocean and the horizon as I crossed a marvellous bridge. Strangely enough, I have no photographs of the moments that have stayed with me longer than others. Maybe that's because life's most special moments never announce themselves with a pose--when they come, we are never ready with a camera. But I am digressing here.

Here is perhaps what makes the mind's "camera" more special to me: a photograph captures the moment like a hunter would a prize, but when we capture a moment or object of beauty in our mind, it is a tribute, and to some infinitesimal yet profound extent, an act of surrender.

I wonder how many would agree. :)