This weekend we went to a water-park and boy the fun we had! There we were, a motley group of women in all shapes and sizes in their thirties to fifties, having a blast and there wasn’t a single camera to click us! 😮

What a disappointment!! All the mobile phones were locked away in the lockers and there we were at the wave pool, dancing, screaming and not missing the camera at all. How often does this happen in today’s times? The fun we had was invaluable and the memories we made were priceless but nothing much to post on social media! And to me that was the best part of the trip.

I know many wouldn’t agree that not being able to take many pics was a great thing to happen. The foremost reason being that the moments are captured for a lifetime since taking pics is akin to ‘creating memories’. And the opportunity it gives to keep visiting and strengthening those moments in our memory.

It is true to some extent but i believe that in general the most beautiful experiences/ memories are not captured by a camera or recorded but are still remembered vividly because of the multiple sensory connections that are made due to the total involvement.I remember when Shubham was born, Abhay always kept a camera loaded to click him and capture the moments. There are many beautiful pics of Shubham from his childhood, innumerable albums but i don’t remember the last time I looked into those although i vividly remember the first time he turned, his first step, and many more incidents which are not captured anywhere but in memory because of the way i absorbed them while living in the moment and it got committed to memory forever.

Having a camera handy in the form of a mobile is a good thing but I feel that we forget to live in the moment and absorb it in totality, in the pursuit to capture the moment. For instance just a few days back i and a family friend went out for dinner. We had a good time, the friend insisted on taking pics, selfies, etc. On our way back Shubham and i were talking about the frescoes installed in the restaurant and the other paintings and the friend wondered what we were talking about and where were those installations. We had spent about three hours at the place making memories with the camera but ironically they did not remember anything about the place we had been to.

Pictures are important for preserving moments. They are similar to the older generations preserving letters, revisiting the words in those letters was their way of keeping the connections strong in absence of the experience of touch, taste, smell and very little of aural and visual connections. Visuals make those connections stronger. But they show only a part of the experience and not the entire experience. Nothing could be more precious than a pic clicked while soaking in the moment or experience.Like a friend said, “We know who we are. The pics are a reminder of what was.”