Love at first touch

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE

There are at least five reasons why I have to love my camera. It deserves affection for the way it can macro me into the centre of ruby red flowers whose sun-painted stamens glitter into my grubby afternoon.

It can circle the fat, floral, round tub of an icy green cockscomb till its rainbow ruffles douse a dismal day with delight. It can also coax the laziest most unhelpful cat to suddenly zero in to its frame with a blink of burnished blessings.

My camera can clamber up and sneak into an amazing Hollyhock Parlour with 40 or more of these amazing flowers snoozing or gossiping on one single plant! But the best reason for loving my camera is that it coaxes me to walk till it makes all uninvited flab vamoose! It badgers me to wander around my often creased world with eyes open to wonder. And the wealth comes at me in coloured dressing.

Someone recently gifted me a new Bridge camera – something between a compact camera and an SLR. My SLR resembling a friend who does what he or she has promised to do for me, I didn’t wan’t a bridge camera. I told the ignored bridge lying in my bag, “Sorry, but using you seems like having the nerve to invite Brad Pitt to lunch and then realising the folly of it. What on earth would I feed him?” Then one afternoon my SLR suddenly stopped functioning on a street rich with poppy red summer flowers  and many garden walls wearing swan white bougainvilla lace curtains.

I picked up the new Bridge camera feeling like I had gone on and invited Brad Pitt to lunch after all, and having a free day, he had actually arrived!

Then as I shivered but focused, the astounding ultra zoom clambered right up to inspect the red dazzle of nine flowers picnicking under someone’s high balcony and I clicked!

Then it skimmed around the vanilla ice cream bougainvilla lace like a genie retrieving gems for free. My Bridge camera also began to show me the gold and silver embroidery always lurking under the leakages of living – just waiting to dazzle our souls. In fact, perhaps that is why the leakage comes to cut us up and open our eyes. And my Bridge doled out such stars in my afternoon venture that I was shimmer -struck as if Brad Pitt had not only gobbled up my rava dosas, dhoklas, methi puris and rasam rice, but had asked for  kesari bath as well!