A picture is worth a thousand words

“It is not enough to act. You need to be seen to act.” Immortal and prescient words from one of my bosses some decades ago…

Just returned from a holiday in Maldives. Absolute paradise on earth. The island resort we stayed in was amazing, the staff were fabulous and we had the most enjoyable vacation. Mainly, we have the pictures to prove it; and that’s actually the story I’ve come here to tell!!

 

The early signs were visible even in the farewells as we left for our dream vacation. “Have a great time and post pics in the family WhatsApp group”, said my sister. Words that I took as seriously as a “send us a postcard” remark back in the days. 

 

Landed in Maldives. Traveling by a seaplane for the first time. It was quite an experience, watching the plane plough through the water, foam splashing all over, scything through the blue green water at a fast clip. As I cast my eye around, I could see that I was the lone passenger who was seeing what was going on with the naked eye. Everyone else had their phones out and was recording the event for posterity. The moment we landed in the resort, there was a veritable stampede towards the reception area for a wifi connection so that the seaplane videos could be shared with the rest of the world…

 

Even as I was checking in and enquiring about the rooms, cuisines and  other amenities on offer, my wife and daughter were already scoping the place out for the various photoshoots that would happen over our stay; the locations, the light angles, time of day, the dresses to wear and all the other seemingly infinite number of calculations that had to be factored in. So now the entire holiday schedule of activities had to be woven around the photoshoots!

 

The only consolation to me was that this was apparently a full blown epidemic. Vacationers of all hues, ignoring the ethereal and idyllic surroundings, were into this frenzied capturing of moments and transmitting them to the world real time, with some inanely hypocritical comment like “Humbled by mother earth’s beauty!”, displaying scant regard for what some dude or dudette, sitting trapped in some gloomy office with looming deadlines at work, would do when they saw a video of you paragliding over blue green waters! And then the post dinner activity of counting the “Likes” against each picture that was posted over the day!!!

 

At some point in Man’s journey, the power of the idea became supreme and the Pen was indeed mightier than the sword. Clearly, we are now in the era of the Camera relegating the Pen from its preeminent position, where everything needs to be caught in pictures and videos. The oral or even the written word no longer suffices. If you claim to have bumped into a long lost friend or a celebrity, you need to provide pics to meet the evidentiary standards prevalent today. “In God, we trust”, the world seems to be saying, “but for everything else show me the pictures”. 

 

We get all contemplative when we talk about the moral dilemma that the folks who split the atom were faced with and how it apparently destroyed their sanity. I would like to someday conduct a mental assessment of the person who put the camera in the mobile phone and wrought such havoc upon civilization. 

 

At a more mundane level, when these paradigms change, there are some winners and some losers. My pathetic inadequacy at the language of the camera lands me very squarely on the wrong side of this divide. I am not camera friendly. Maybe even a little scared. Scopophobia, I believe it’s called. On the bright side, the fact that someone went through the trouble of coining a word for this indicates that it is not all that rare. However, most people seem to intuitively get the basics of Photogenicity 101 – that smile that you reserve for the camera and camera alone, that quick sucking in of the paunch, working that precise sideways angle so that the you lose a few pounds to the camera and such things. My sister, for instance, doles out pro bono tips on this topic in our family whatsapp group, in the process commanding the kind of respect and attention that even none of my college professors were able to. I am unfortunately stuck at level zero - every time I know the picture is going to be clicked my brain freezes, with the only movement coming from my eyelids that have this uncanny ability to dead heat the blink of the eye with the camera click. 

 

The Selfie makes a bad thing worse, adding further dimensions of complexity to a difficult situation. The absolute worst is when I have to take the group selfie. What with holding the phone with one hand, getting the palm position right to cover the angle and ensure no one is left out of the frame and finally making sure that my thumb is situated so that I can click the picture without shaking the camera, I’m guaranteed to be a spent force. Invariably, I will be squinting at the screen trying to locate the click button. In all the selfies that I have clicked, it will look like I’m peering over the rim of some container observing some gross things swimming inside. And don’t even get me started on the inevitable request from at least one person from the group to retake the photo as she doesn’t look her best. Or a he. Though, it’s usually a she! 

 

Not surprisingly, to add affront to insult, the number of times I’ve been cropped out of a picture are too numerous to count. And by those I would normally consider my near and dear ones! People think we scopophobes don’t notice such things; we do, just that we suffer the humiliation in hurt silence…

 

Even existentially settled issues like the function of Food are being called into question. The first reason the buffet plate gets carefully compiled is so that an aesthetic picture can be taken. So typically, the caption for the pic gets decided, which then dictates what to load on the plate and importantly, what to leave out. The taste, the nutrition content and other similar distractions don’t figure in the equation.

 

However, I am consoled by the fact that I seem to have got off relatively lightly. A large portion of my life was lived in the days marked by a lack of this animal frenzy for pictures. Listen to this. Very recently, when we were staying in a nearby beach resort, I remember egging my family on to wake up and watch the sunrise. To my bewilderment, there was unanimous enthusiasm for the idea. I was to later figure out that my daughter had always wanted a picture at dawn, where apparently the light effects are quite unique!

 

Anyway, 520 am and we were on the beach. Striking a very incongruous picture on the sandy beach were a couple in full traditional bridal dress and make up! And with them a full crew of people for a photoshoot, a light boy, one with a make up kit, a camera person and a co-ordinator who was barking orders in the still, pre-dawn air. We subsequently learnt that they had got married a few days ago and were here for a pre-honeymoon (more on this pre-post phenomenon later!!). We kept running into the couple at various times over the next couple of days, in the restaurants, in the lawns, lobby, etc., always with the photo crew in tow. Apparently, they were going to make a coffee table book of their pre-honeymoon holiday. Hopefully the book will consist of U-rated content!

 

I look back nostalgically at the ancient photo albums we had lovingly stored over the years, which we used to, once in a while, dust off and reminisce over those, admittedly imperfect, pictures fondly. Paradoxically, with so much digital memory at our disposal, I’m struggling to remember when I last went through my phone or laptop to remember some long forgotten memory. It’s Click it, Post it, Forget it. Bizarrely I seem to be scrolling through my pics and videos only when I run out of memory storage!

 

While smartphones are getting smarter with each release, the universal law of conservation of intelligence, which postulates that the total system intelligence comprising all users and their devices remains constant, gives you some indication about the average intelligence level of people compared to earlier? If you’re scratching your head to figure this out I would have proved my point!

 

There’s no escaping this potent and evil partnership of phone cameras and social media. You might as well grin and bear it. Which, in modern parlance translates to “say cheese and take a selfie”…

 

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