Frozen Frames

In the second year of college - about ten years ago - I got my first digital camera, a shiny ash-coloured Sony Cybershot. It was a requirement for our Journalism class, especially since we had to run the WCC college newspaper that year.

My only experience of handling a camera before this was during my Class X and Class XII outstation excursions, for which I borrowed my Chachidaddy's (maternal aunt's husband) Panasonic film camera. Sure, there was a VGA camera in my first ever Nokia phone, the one I got when I joined college in 2008. But I seldom used it; my phone hardly did have any memory space left as I always kept the 1 GB (yes, just 1 GB!) memory card full with songs. For the generation that has only seen "smart" phones, VGA is about 0.3 megapixels by the way!

So, naturally, when I got my very own camera, I was quite excited. I took it to college every single day for the next two years, whether or not it was required of me to report anything that was happening there! I loved that I could click the same picture innumerable times until I got it right. I loved that I didn't have to send the roll of film to be developed. I didn't have to wait for the prints to tell me that I had taken a handful of shots in a weird tilted angle or with the flash shining brighter than the sun!

It seems unbelievable today that I am talking of a time that was just ten years ago, doesn't it? Now it is commonplace to casually click pictures of everything from our food to our painted feet. Click, delete - click, edit, post! It's as simple as that! But back in my WCC days, I felt like I had unleashed a superpower!

My camera was an extremely prized possession for me, and I handled it with great care. If my sister (who was then about nine) asked me if she could borrow the camera, I would insist that she put her hand through the safety loop first. I also clearly remember a day (when we were on our trip to Goa), a friend of mine dropped my camera and I'd felt shocked, sad, angry and a lot of other emotions, all at once!

With my camera, I clicked pictures of everything in the college - from the grass to the college cat (Edward), from the bumchums to the beautiful buildings that made up the campus...even fallen flowers! I would click pictures of random things at home, and even take the camera with me when I visited my cousins or grandparents, where I would click more pictures! And I would upload them all to my (old, now deleted) Facebook albums.

Back then, I loved my camera and the ability it gave me to freeze the frame that caught my eye and save it for all posterity. I don't know when I outgrew that love, that obsession, that almost- compulsive need to carry it around everywhere. Maybe it was on the day I got my first smartphone, with cameras in the front and back?

Now, after what seems like a lifetime later, I remember my good ol' camera once again because I recently came across many of these pictures (from my Facebook account backup). Yes, it was a rather unexpected quarantine discovery that took me on an intense trip down memory lane!

To be honest, I don't even know where the camera is today! I hope it's still around, hiding in some corner of the drawer under my study table. I'll definitely be looking for it when I visit my parents the next time. But for now, I'm psyched that some of the pictures found their way to me!