Sometimes, life is just a walk in the park...

Actually, these days, it’s more of a photography session!

Spring is always the best time to take a walk in Delhi’s Lodi Gardens. The flowers are blooming, the trees are alive, the grass is greener than ever, and the birdsong is enough to make your heart soar. This spring though, as I walked briskly down its little winding roads, I realized that while I hadn’t been looking Lodi Gardens had turned into a photography studio rather than the neighbourhood park I remembered it as. 

To be fair, over the years, you could always find the odd couple posing for their engagement/wedding photos, looking self-conscious and embarrassed in all their finery amidst the joggers in their track pants and T-shirts. But this was something entirely different.

As I entered through the Ashoka Gate, the first thing I saw was a heavily-pregnant lady, wearing a maroon empire-line maxi-dress, posing in silhouette against one of the many monuments Lodi Gardens is littered with. Kneeling in front of her was a man who I presumed was her husband, his hand placed proprietorially on her baby bump. Immortalizing this moment for posterity (and for the progeny) was a burly bearded photographer wielding a DSLR camera like it was an offensive weapon, while his two assistants held up sheets of white thermacol at different angles to provide the best light.

I smiled indulgently at this tableau and moved on. I couldn’t have gone more than thirty paces when yet another photography session caught my eye. This time it was a couple who looked to be in their early 30s, accompanied by a whole team of hair and make-up people, who had opened their little suitcase of products and were conducting urgent repairs on the principals. Once the touch-up was done, one of the photographer’s assistants handed the couple a golden balloon in the shape of the number one. They hoisted it up between them, smiled widely and said ‘cheese’ to celebrate what I can only hope was their first anniversary. 

Fifty yards on, another love story was being memorialized on camera. This time, it was clearly a proposal, or rather, the re-enacting of one. The boy was in the now-mandatory position of being down on one knee, holding up a ring box in his right hand, while he held out his left arm in what can only be described as a Shah Rukh Khan pose. The girl was doing her best Sushmita-Sen-wins-Miss-Universe impression, holding her hands to her mouth in mock-shock and faux-awe. They held this pose for absolute ages as the photographer captured it from every conceivable angle. Given how much effort they had put into the ‘proposal’ I was sure that their marriage would be the stuff of legend.

And thus it went, photo-session after photo-session, as I tried my best to meet my target of 10,000 steps. And not just that day either; this wa pretty much par for the course every single time I went for a walk in Lodi Gardens.

As I trudged along, I tried to figure out what accounted for this sudden urge for ordinary, middle-class folk to conduct ‘glam shoots’ to commemorate some moment or the other. And then, it suddenly hit me: Instagram!

That’s where all these photos were headed; to be posted on ‘Insta’ with a plethora of hashtags for their family and friends to ‘like’ and comment on. And everyone knows that when it comes to Instagram, you have to look your very best, the photo has to be professional quality, so why not hire experts to do the job? Sure, it can’t be cheap. But hey, a good photo will live on forever on Insta; and who knows, if it is striking enough, it may even go viral!

I guess this was bound to happen one day. A movement that began with everybody taking pictures of their breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the odd fancy meal at an expensive restaurant was bound to end up with heavily-curated pictures of seminal moments of our lives, all subtly highlighted and posted on Insta with a suitable filter (X-pro or Lo-fi, anyone?). After all, if you post innumerable photos showing off the beautiful locations of your summer/winter vacations, then how can you ignore important milestones like proposals, anniversaries, pregnancies, etc.? And surely, such landmark moments rate more than the usual ‘selfies’ (even if they are taken with a selfie-stick). No, you need to call in the professionals at such times.

So, I guess that’s why my favourite neighbourhood spot for long, lonely walks has been transformed into Photography Central. There are more glittery stilettoes in evidence than sturdy running shoes. There are more shiny dresses around than there are jogging pants. And there are more hair and make-up people around than actual exercise enthusiasts.

And you know what? I love it!

I love watching those young lovers making gooey eyes at one another. I love seeing the look of pride in a young man’s eyes as he cradles his wife’s pregnant belly. And, of course, I love the corny proposal scenarios that play out every day in front of me.

I don’t know how much these photography sessions cost (and I, for one, would never pay good money for them). But I do know that for sheer entertainment value alone, they are priceless. 

Life, camera, boredom

If you photograph every moment as being ‘special’ then soon there will be no ‘special moments’ at all

Have smartphone; will take pictures. That seems to be the motto everyone lives by these days. So, no moment of our day goes undocumented, no meal is eaten before first being captured on camera, and everyone from pets, children, spouses, friends, lovers, passers-by, get photographed several times in the course of a day. If we are on holiday, things tend to get completely out of hand, as we chronicle every moment as it happens, just to be sure we are not missing out on documenting something really important. And that’s not counting the selfies, the self-portraits we take obsessively, day in and day out.

And it’s not as if these pictures just live on our smartphone memory cards. The process isn’t complete until every image (except the unflattering ones that are deleted instantly) is posted on some social media platform or the other for your friends, family, colleagues, and complete strangers to ‘like’ or ‘favourite’, or respond to with a gushy comment or two.

I really have no problem with this. If taking pictures incessantly and sharing them with the world is what rocks your boat, then go right ahead (though I hope you won’t mind if I avert my gaze discreetly). But I do wonder if in this mad race to let no moment go unrecorded, we are losing out on something that all of us deserve: those special moments that are captured on camera and trigger off happy memories every time we see them.

My generation has plenty of those. There are the grainy baby pictures taken by the proud dad in the first flush of parenthood, which still evoke a smile even though the composition often leaves a lot to be desired and the picture quality has deteriorated over time. There are those photos that freeze-frame our awkward phase, as we pose for the school photographer at a Teacher’s Day or Children’s Day function or even at the annual prize-giving ceremony, and which our children giggle at snidely. There are the honeymoon pix, immortalizing the fashion of a decade that style forgot, which make us wonder: ‘Did I really wear that? What was I thinking?’

But for all their cheerful amateurism, their potential for embarrassment, their sheer cheeziness on occasion, these photos are like a window into a more innocent, happy time, when there were no filters to make everything glow, when realism held its own against fakery and photo-shop. These pictures still have to power to move us, whether it is to laughter or tears, joy or sorrow. They are little vignettes of our past, which unlock memories that we had thought lost forever.

Will that pleasure ever be available to Generation Cameraphone? After all, how special can any one memory be if every single one of them is immortalized in a photograph? If every moment is seen as special, and worthy of being frozen on camera, then is any moment truly special? If you chronicle every living moment does any one moment remain memorable?

The truth is that pictures tend to lose their power and poignancy when there are so many of them that your primary emotion is of being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. And going by the way everyone tends to go bonkers the moment they get access to a cameraphone, we will all soon be completely swamped by pictures of our every living-breathing moment, lovingly altered by a flattering filter. But none of them will have the ability to truly move us, because while familiarity may not breed contempt it will certainly engender boredom on a colossal scale.

So, we may well be the last generation to have our memories encased in photo-albums that are pulled out at family reunions, and laughed and cried over in equal measure. The ones who come after us will have seen it all on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Whathaveyou, and been bored out of their skulls in the process. The last thing they will want is to look at another picture. And if they do look at it, their first instinct will be to mouth ‘like’ and move on, instead of reliving the moment it freeze-frames.

What they will have is gimmicks. A series of selfies shot every day for a period of ten years, put together in a time lapse, to show how a cute little boy/girl grew up into a moody/handsome/sexy grown up. Travel pictures manipulated to show rainbows even when none appeared; landscapes digitally altered to show hues that don’t exist in nature; and of course the wonders of photo-shop applied indiscriminately.

But all this trickery will not be enough to create the immediacy of the photographs of another time, those that were special for being taken only on special occasions, those that had meaning because they captured meaningful events, and those that live on forever because they encapsulate the best moments of our lives.

As for us, I fear that we will soon become a society that misses the wood for the trees. Or, in words that Generation Cameraphone can understand, a society that will miss the images for the hashtags.