Month: August 2013

The digital age of photography is empowers us to capture moments our memory might find hard to contain. It is an experience captured and is democratic, writes Namita Bhandare.

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A shaft of sunlight falls on the girl asleep on my bed. Her father lies next to her and I can’t help smiling as I notice that her arm is wrapped tightly around him. In another few minutes she will wake up, oblivious to what this moment means to me, or even that it happened. In another few days she leaves for college, spreading her wings in a world that belongs to her. When she returns, my daughter who slept on my bed cuddled against her father will be gone, replaced by an older and, hopefully, wiser self.

Right now there is something so ineffably fragile about this moment that I take out my iPhone and photograph it. It’s as if I’m trying to freeze that moment in my head and as if by doing so, somehow, magically I will postpone that inevitable farewell; as if that pixelated image on my phone screen will sustain me after she has left; as if that image is somehow more reliable than what I already know.

A photograph is an experience captured. “All photographs are momento mori,” wrote Susan Sontag when she first published her collection of essays On Photography in 1973, years before digital technology made photographers of us all. Now we click incessantly and instagram constantly everything we deem worthy of record — a restaurant meal, a sleeping dog, laundry drying in the sun.

Inevitably we accumulate a detritus of the merely trivial. “It’s as if the more photos we take, the more eventful our lives will themselves become,” wrote columnist Trisha Gupta recently in the Sunday Guardian. But it’s not as if our lives are fuller or busier. It’s just that we find it easier to record it, for better or worse.

Minus the accoutrements of a previous era — expensive film, developing chemicals, a dark room — the digital age of photography is empowering and democratic. We are all chroniclers now. From the street rage in Egypt to a grandparent’s gnarled hands, we shoot, we collect, we document and we seek to leave our mark.

So a project in Mexico City gets street children to photograph their lives and create awareness. In Lebanon a 10-day workshop with street kids and orphans results in stunning images. Former child soldiers in Mozambique seek salvation behind a lens. And in Kolkata, children and women in prostitution discover their creativity and self-worth through workshops. This is a brave new world, how can you not applaud it?

On a personal level, a photograph empowers us to capture moments that an uncertain memory might find hard to contain. Perhaps we realise that we live in an unpredictable world over which we have little control; and this is as true of an earlier age as of the one we live in. Photographs sustain us: parents long gone, younger and more idealistic selves, the shining hope in a child’s eyes as she sets off for the first day of school, birthday candles being blown out, holiday past. Pictorial evidence of memories that build a life together.

One of my most memorable holidays was a road trip I took years ago with my girlfriends, minus camera. “Photograph this in your head,” my friend shouted as we drove along winding roads, the ocean beating on our side. I did. But what if that which is remembered is not true to life? What if memory is false to reality?

This year I will be going on that road trip again, asking myself: was what I saw and remember as fabulous and magical as what I imprinted on my memory? Or has my memory exaggerated a clearly happy time in my life? No experience is ever the same. This time, 25 years later and older I will be accompanied not by my girlfriends but my daughters, a last trip before we say goodbye.

And, yes, I will probably have more photographs than I can possibly manage to leaf through again and again when they are gone.

Twitter: @namitabhandare
The views expressed by the author are personal

Hours after I return from Bhutan’s Mountain Echoes literature festival, I find myself rather appropriately elbow-deep in books. Lit fests open windows to this closed world. Namita Bhandare writes.

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Hours after I return from Bhutan’s Mountain Echoes literature festival, I find myself rather appropriately elbow-deep in books. The house-painters had moved in. I had promised to empty out my bookshelves before I left. And of course I hadn’t.

It was imperative that I pack my books away myself. This was not a job that could be delegated because the plan was to create a super-organised system that would put Dewey to shame. Out came neatly marked boxes. Indian fiction, non-fiction, yellowing paperbacks (many ruthlessly dispatched to hapless beneficiaries), essays, journalism, books I had read to my kids, travel, reference, translations, classics (an embarrassingly small box), poetry (a surprisingly large one), books written by friends and family and, of course, when patience begins to wear thin, that handy category: misc.

We want to stack books in an order where we can easily find them. Yet, there can be few greater pleasures than stumbling across a book long forgotten. In disorder lies the seed of a magical discovery. Some books defy categorisation. Where does the book-bought-because-it-was-discounted go? Oh, and the Great Author bought only because, well, it was the Great Author but you couldn’t really read beyond two paragraphs? And, then, books gifted by former loved ones that once were angrily shoved into dark corners but now only bring wry remembrance?

People look at books in different ways. A friend whose only extravagance is buying books says he never inscribes his name on them. For him, a book is not a thing to be owned but shared; sometimes it comes back, sometimes it doesn’t. “Words and great ideas can’t be possessed,” he says. We live in different countries and spend the intervening months before we meet setting aside the books we believe we must exchange. I never get mine back.

To rummage through your books is to retrace a life. There was a time when I had to compulsively scrawl my name as soon as I had bought a new book in an unvarying formula that included name, place where purchased and year. I now find myself smiling as I come face to face with a younger self, the self-assurance and arrogance of that sloping slant of a hand-writing I no longer recognise in a name I no longer use. The first Pico Iyer I ever bought (Video Nights in Kathmandu) and then a long succession that continues to this date. The first VS Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas, was required reading for my literature course; the ones that followed were bought for love.

Now I find that I don’t inscribe the books I buy. At 50, I am somewhat wiser and more aware that a book is a gift from someone who has sat up nights and woken early to agonise over the art of stringing 26 letters of the alphabet together. Nor do I ever ask for author signings. When you have the nakedness of a soul bared in a whole book, a signature on the front-page is meaningless.

Of all the human gifts, the art of storytelling is perhaps the most humbling to receivers and certainly the richest to those who possess it. For four days in Thimphu I met more writers and thinkers than I will in the year ahead and the year just past. Delicate story-tellers like Kunzang Choden who has only to finish a tale to leave you greedy for more. The luminescent Buddhist nun Ani Choying Drolma whose Singing for Freedom and tale of childhood abuse and subsequent redemption will make you weep. The starkness of actor Kelly Dorji’s short story on the sense of abandonment that follows the breakdown of family ties.

To read or write a book is a privilege but a private activity, done in the sanctity of solitude. Literature festivals open windows to seekers of a world that is otherwise closed. For a few days, barriers are down for both writers and readers, united only by their belief that the written word makes the world easier to bear.

Twitter: @namitabhandare

The views expressed by the author are personal