The Photo

I stared at the photo for quite sometime… It was beautiful… One of the few times I liked looking at myself in photos. The black caught the light in my hair adding a sheen that as I stood in the mirror I tried to search. My face looked happy, peaceful, almost glowing…

I wondered what was so special about that picture. Was it the timelessness in it that appealed to me? Or was it the sharp contrast, the only duality present that made it so much less complex, almost easy to read. It made me wonder…

The world we live in today is so filled with sights and colours. Splashes of paint everywhere. The light yellow building with coral borders… The fresh green leaves standing out in sharp contrast with the brown, almost mossy ones littered on the ground… the blue sky and the brown earth (or perhaps grey in our cement jungles)… There was so much to see…

Everytime I saw a picture, there would be a million questions… Is the sharpness right? Will the colours look better if I adjust the brightness? Will a vivid shade appeal or should I tone down my colours… There were a million options… Cameras with everything from brightness adjustor to a variety of options to choose from… Sepia, Tint, B&W, etc etc…  And each new model gave me more better features… And I always wanted the best one. How many times I passed over the existing ones in the unrelenting wait for a better model… “Oh, they’ve introduced one this time… What will be it next?” And I never bought anything…

However, while I clicked photos, my fingers invariably went to that one button on my phone… The one mode which somehow appealed to me more than the rest… The B&W mode… I didn’t know what was so special about it?  Why did it appeal to me so much? And why was everyone I knew obsessed with it? Whenever my and my gang clicked pics, nothing special, just a randomness to capture the moment or perhaps to remind myself that something had been special then at a future date, we invariably ended up clicking the black and white images…

It made me wonder… Why? What was it in the yin and yan combination that so appealed to our eyes? “Our Generation” had everything all around us... A step away…  A life filled with colours and joy… We had even associated colours with emotions, moments… White for peace, Green for jealousy, Red for love, blood, lust, Yellow for sunshine… Then why the sudden urge to get out of them and alienate ourselves?

Was in this myriad of colour, our own need lost? The need for simplicity… The need to stand out… The need to stop being so multiple, so varied and just be a clean and simple human. No confusions, no cacophony of this or that? Just a simple black and white… he world painted in our eyes…

I stared at my photo thinking what it was… Maybe, it was the black and white… Or perhaps I only saw the greys…