Capturing Time

Time passes so quickly. Once we pass a second, it is gone. We cannot retrieve it with the exact properties and situations once it is through.  All the time in life, I was conscious about this property of time. Being a person who is easily hurt by the merciless betrayal of passing moments, I used to employ cameras to record stills of moments that I like to linger for ever. This has now become a very funny thing to practice. With the advent of social networking sites like facebook, I already have a platform to showcase my captured moments in front of a moderately big viewer circle. 

So, this post’s intention is to feature some of the snaps that I collected. Many of those pictures are very awkward, funny, and curious. The first picture is a board placed in one of the posh areas of Cochin City. It warns against dumping trash and waste materials on roadside. A rough translation of what is written on this board may be like this, ‘anyone who dumps waste on roadside will be chased and beaten up’.

Another picture was taken on my mobile when I was travelling to Cochin on my bike after my weekend visit at home. After clearing a curve, I happened to see a breath taking view of the Gods own country. I stopped my vehicle and took many stills of it, and posted in facebook which in turn received a good number of likes and appreciations.

Homelessness is a curse. Imagine a circumstance in which you are driven out of your home and left with nothing except a mosquito net. I happened to see a man goes to sleep in a temporary comfort created by his mosquito net on an isolated corridor of one of the busiest shopping complexes of the city. In the below picture you can see that man in a habitat made of mosquito net.

If you see how the English speaking people count the number of floors of a multi storied building, you will find that it is different from the way Indians count it. Indian’s first floor is Englishman’s ground floor. Englishman’s first floor is Indian’s second floor, etc. Usually in elevators, we see the switches to go to different floors are labeled in the European style, like G (Ground Floor), 1, 2, etc. But, quite recently I saw an elevator with switches labeled in the Indian system. 

Innovation has no boundaries especially when it comes to advertising. Nowadays we can see people using even the toilets for branding. For example, see how Club FM Radio conveys socially relevant messages while tactically marketing themselves. Boards with similar messages are placed in every latrine of the Multiplex in Oberon Mall at our eye level so that we wouldn’t leave the place without reading it.

Some days before, I saw a forward in facebook, which was a hilarious take on the way people pose differently for photographs for different purposes. You can see the forward at right, which has a cat staring at the camera, reminding us of the way we pose for a passport size photograph, and the same cat with a stylish grin in another photo representing the type of pictures that we usually put in our facebook profiles. 

At Café, I tried to imitate the cat’s passport size stare, and tried to take a snap of myself in that expression. But, I was hindered by my friend who was watching my actions. And what I finally got was this snap. I bet you haven’t seen anything funnier than this in recent times.