Photo albums and bottomless timelines

Digital and mobile phone cameras have been one of the coolest inventions. I love them, we all do. Click on the go and upload on Facebook. Get 'Likes' and comments galore.

But a few days later, the photos are lost in bottomless timelines. Some of our best photos and moments disappear in the "scroll down" mode of social media sites.

I did not realise all of this until one fine day I saw my mom rearranging our childhood pictures in her photo album. Oh it was so nice to hold those photographs and recall those lovely days! There is something special about touching those matte and gloss finish photos, turning them over to see handwritten dates and sliding them into those plastic sections of the album!

In the last few years, most of us scanned our Black & White baby pics, photographs from school, etc. and uploaded them online to digitize them for good. But how often we look back at those albums? And seriously, while they are easy to access and all, they fail to recreate the magic of holding that class photograph and trying to identify old classmates without any clues whatsoever [as online photos take away the fun with the tagging feature, which of course, has its own different magic in news Feed et al].

So yeah, I enjoyed going through the several photo albums carefully preserved by mom. And though I totally dislike my photos in my wedding album, when it is shown to our guests the feeling is unmatched. The cute discussions, smiles and anecdotes that follow are unmatched as we spend at least a minute on each page.

"Oh the parlourwaali did a horrific job!"

"People said that the food was awesome but remember how we were so tired after the endless ceremonies that we could not savour the delicacies!"

"The vintage car was the cherry on the cake... remember how slow it moved and how we enjoyed the slight breeze and the sparkle in the eyes of the onlookers!"

Aah seriously, these nostalgic chats beat the 100+ likes we get on the photographs. Timelines are good, but the good old photo albums have their own special place.

So how about spending an hour or so browsing though those long lost folders saved in the D-drive of our machines and picking a few to get them printed! And then getting them actually printed and sliding them into the plastic sheets of the photo albums? Do let us know if you do so and we can share how it felt. Are you in?

~Anuradha Khanna Pentapalli
http://annucool15.blogspot.in