It was an anxious exam afternoon, I was already at a dark place mentally and the exam was just an added bonus to the suffering ! However after the exam was over, as my friends and I were leaving, we crossed a professor, so we stopped to have, what we thought would be a small talk but ended up being a long and a nice one, it was more of an educative one. After a point a classmate took out her phone to click a picture to put on snapchat. The professor genuinely asked how snapchat worked and he commented "We are not living, we are watching ourselves live." There was a lot that happened in my head when he said those words!
It was evening already when we finally walked out to the gate to go home. It was winter time and little did I know that while I would walk out, I'd marvel at the atmosphere, filled with cloudy mist, the trees popping out here and there and the orange hue of the sunset reflecting through it all!
Seeing all of this made me speechless! I could not put my head down, not until I got enough of the bliss of watching it, I wondered if I could ever! Reflexively my hand searched for the pocket with the phone, then the professor's words echoed in my mind when I decided to let myself soak in this wonder, to become meditative.
Rather than resting into 'being', we are all watching ourselves from a third person's point of view, every moment. When I see a mind blowing sight, my immediate instinct is to pull out my phone to capture it, while doing so I think about how as a picture it looks good rather than absorbing its aesthetics in the present. I love freezing memories but I'm also worried about not having lived in it. What good is a memory if you have not truly partaken in it?
-Bhooja Ramaswamy
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Sometimes we get anxious not having our phone around us. Too bad 🥲🥲