Picture-perfect, or was it?

“Amma, please smile. It is a photo not a punishment,” I called out to my mother even as she fumed at me while clicking her photograph.

We delicately sat on mules as they made their way up to the Vaishno Devi Temple in Katra in Jammu. I had got down gracelessly and pestered my Amma to oblige and pose for a photograph. This was way back in 2005 when one actually developed camera rolls to reveal raw, unfiltered and untouched upon photos of our glorious selves in our perhaps embarrassing get-ups. Remember the cringe-worthy ones we all obliged to when the friendly tourist guide asked us to pose with pots and pans, flower baskets, trying the Kashmir ki kali look as we donned the Kashmiri Phiran? Now when I look at that that photograph my Amma stares petulantly at my point and shoot camera, almost as if silently seething at my suggestion that she smile for the picture. A similar look can in a picture I clicked of my parents as they posed beside a tired yak at the Tsongmo/ Changu lake when we visited Sikkim.

I suppose they obliged to my photography whims because I often complained about not having enough photos of me as a toddler. I was the last among three children, by which time I suppose the parenthood hoopla dies down quite a bit and exhaustion of everyday routine looms large!

So, while I sympathise with my folks, I never let them forget it! Today, more than 17 years after our Kashmir and Sikkim photos were clicked, I understand that tired smile of Amma and I commiserate with her reticence in bringing a forced curve on the lips especially when one is feeling the least glamourous!

Therefore, I reckon it is Karma that has come back to show me my place, when my own 10-year-old daughter asks me to smile and pose for selfies in places and situations, I may be uncomfortable or more importantly may not be ready!

In the olden days, where the photos clicked took time to develop and one could see the end result only much later, we perhaps had enough time to placate any ill-conceived vanity we may have had in our glamourous looks, the photo prints were solid testimony of our infallibility and our idiocy in believing that we were master photographers with our Yashica cameras and we could produce œuvres d’ art! One could not recreate either the moment or the photo; it simply had been locked in print that perhaps showed you for who you were. Today, phone photography rules can make even the most badly lit situation seem luminous or at the most poetically eerie.