It's A Snap!

Remember the 110 camera? Look it up if you have forgotten or you are too young to have seen one. That was the first camera that I bought. It was compact and easy to use, consisting of basically a point-and-shoot mechanism. It even had a telephoto option and a small sliding cover for the lens. If you forgot to open that and took a picture, the result may look as though you had used a filter. Come to think of it, I wonder if that was the intended use of it. The cartridge held 24 frames and could be loaded or unloaded with ease. I would just aim the thing in the general direction of the scene I wanted to capture, and if I liked what I saw through the viewfinder, I would click. 

There was no telling how the pictures would turn out. I had to wait for the film to be developed and prints made. Given that I was no expert photographer, if 3 or 4 pictures out of 10 looked alright, I would be happy. There were some surprisingly good ones too every now and then. I created albums by curating the best shots. After a few years, the prints faded or acquired this strange orange haze maybe because of the materials used in the album, exposure to UV light, and so on. 

After I graduated to a 35 mm camera, I was able to take better pictures (I think!) but the camera came with so many controls that befuddled me. Usually, I ended using the automatic option which meant that the camera decided most of the settings like exposure. The quality of printing meanwhile got better and at the same time less expensive as a result of stiff competition. 

And so, the collection of photographs grew steadily and in inverse proportion to that, the enthusiasm to curate them into albums. The photos simply ended up in envelopes and the envelopes in shoe boxes. The job just became harder and harder as the collection grew. Gone by the wayside was even the discipline of preserving the negatives in any sensible way. Now, I am not a prolific shooter by any measure. I can only imagine what someone who snaps away constantly must be facing. But then, such a person may be more motivated and disciplined. 

Sifting through the collection has become an exciting adventure because you sort of rediscover the moments that you had captured long ago. That nagging voice that says I must sort them out however, continues to be ignored. How about scanning them and making digital copies, you say? Ah, that would require a serious triage to select only those that are worthy of preserving. Plus a commitment to sit for hours scanning, editing, and saving, though ultimately I may have to do this to archive and preserve the pictures.   

Digital photography has certainly proved to be a boon. I don't have to spend money on film or processing. I can even feel good about not wasting resources in printing the bad pictures. Easy uploading to a computer means storage is not a problem.The smartphone has made taking pictures simpler by an order of magnitude. Everyone can now aspire to be a photographer. You don't have to buy a camera and you are always ready to shoot. 

It is estimated that there are nearly five billion smartphone users in the world. Just think about that for a moment. With such a staggering number of people walking around with these devices, and the cheap availability of storage, no moment is too insignificant to save. So we click away merrily. The photos often get uploaded to the cloud. They are shared on social media with friends and families and they keep getting shared to a wider and wider circle often without the original poster knowing. It is scary how these spread out with nary a thought given to privacy issues. Also, I just shudder to think about the enormous amount of cloud storage all the trivia must be taking up and the associated cost. Any savings on film, developing, and printing may be trivial compared to that. 

Don't get me wrong. I fully appreciate the ease of using the phone as a camera (a very good one at that) and the ability to take my 'collection' with me everywhere. It is literally available at my fingertips to browse. But the problem of curating the collection has predictably become much worse with digital photos. The task is simply too enormous. Consider this. In the old days, the wedding photographer usually came back with a printed album within a short time after the event. Today, a wedding may result in a few thousand pictures to sort through. Who has the time to make a hard copy album or even a digital one? If we cannot handle one event, we can forget about scouring through years of digital images. Until you are reminded that you are running out of storage, it is a problem that is easy to ignore. At that point, you simply buy more storage!

I think there is something to be said for a hard copy album of photographs. Sitting down on the couch and thumbing through the pictures is pleasant nostalgic journey. If you wanted to show them to others, it is so much more practical to hand over the printed album or even just the prints than handing over your phone. Call me old-fashioned but scrolling through the pictures on your phone is not quite the same thing. With digital photography, capturing the moments is a breeze but recalling them, not so easy. And having thousands of pictures as opposed to a few hundreds seems to have devalued the pictures somehow (is a picture still worth a thousand words?).

One final point. No matter how good the camera, the way the lens captures certain scenes cannot compare to the way our eyes do. I find that I have to put away the phone sometimes and just enjoy the scene in front of me. There is something in the way we are able to look near and afar simultaneously. As a result, what is simply breathtaking to our eyes can end up looking ordinary on the screen. Sometimes, you have to stop and smell the rose or in this case, stop and enjoy the scene. Or to borrow a phrase, we have to 'stand and stare'.

The Pursuit of Happiness

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"  - Declaration of Independence

The authors of the declaration proclaim only our right to pursue happiness. They were perhaps skeptical whether happiness can actually be attained. I wonder also if they thought that the Creator who endowed us with this 'unalienable right' to pursue happiness, did not at the same time provide us with the means to attaining it. Is it left for individuals to discover the means since we differ in our temperaments and inclinations? Elusive or not, lasting happiness certainly seems to be our overarching goal. Anyone who is unhappy wants to be happy. One who is happy does not want that to change. The purpose of life then is to be happy. 

All of us expect to find our happiness in the world outside in objects, relationships, and so on. We go about this in our own different ways depending on our likes and dislikes. It is important to note that likes and dislikes, and not the world per se, determine whether we find the happiness we seek in the objects that we pursue. The world is the same but can seem different to each of us. We each have our own view of the objects and people surrounding us. We label them as desirable and undesirable and spend our life trying to accumulate the former and avoid the latter. Since the world is not under our control, and our tastes change over time, any happiness enjoyed is fleeting and our efforts generally fall short. Much of our life is spent working for a future attainment, struggling for sporadic occurrences of happiness. Pursuing happiness can thus be exhausting. 

There is another difficulty with finding happiness outside. If objects themselves are inherently capable of giving happiness, they must do so at all times and to all who acquire them. Neither of these is true as we can readily appreciate – one man’s meat is another man’s poison as the saying goes and an object may not even continue to produce happiness at all times to the person who desires it and acquires it. This is evident from the fact that we continue to pursue objects endlessly and find ourselves at the mercy of the world. 

Many years ago, I read 'The Conquest of Happiness' by Bertrand Russell. I was struck by the title. What does conquest mean here? And what do you do after you have conquered happiness? Is it an emotion like anger or fear to be overcome? Is it a trophy to be won? The book is mainly addressed to those who are free from problems like poverty and tries to make the case that in the absence of such privation, it should be possible to obtain happiness by expanding one's interests as wide as possible. Looking outward rather than inward seems to be the prescription, if I may be allowed some simplification. He also believes that the man of science is the happiest because he gets great intellectual satisfaction from his work. Russell states that scientists have no need of complex emotions as a result. They are not dependent on public opinion unlike artists and writers who are miserable because they are at the mercy of critics and the public. But he also adds, "Einstein is honoured while the best painters are left to starve in garrets, and Einstein is happy while the painters are unhappy" indicating that public approval is actually the measure of happiness. I think it is unfortunate to be at the mercy of something as fickle as public opinion for your happiness. 

Today it is the movie actors (or artists) and sports heroes that command public attention while scientists live in relative obscurity. But being the object of public adulation does not seem to bring happiness. It may even bring misery. Despite possessing great wealth or being highly accomplished, people can be unhappy inside. 

In 'The Art of Happiness' by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, the focus is definitely inward. Training the mind is the key to happiness according to the Dalai Lama. Cultivating values such as compassion and affection are important to one's happiness. He says, "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion". Material things can provide sensory pleasure but that is transitory and does little to allay fear and anxiety. On the other hand, joy that comes from inside sustains itself. (You can read more in this article:The purpose of life is to be happy)

Is trying to attain lasting happiness a realistic goal? We saw earlier that objects are not inherently possessed of happiness. Yet we seem to gain a measure of happiness when we acquire an object we desire. So where does this happiness originate? If the object is not the source, then by elimination, it stands to reason that we must be the source. How then do objects make us happy? 

It seems that contact with objects of our desire makes us happy. Conversely, when we desire something and do not possess it, we are unhappy. We are agitated and we put forth effort to obtain that object. Upon getting possession of the object, the agitations are quelled momentarily and we experience peace and joy which stem from inside us. But this is only fleeting because our minds are constantly running after objects – desires will always keep bubbling up, no matter how many are fulfilled and it seems that we are destined to be in a state of agitation forever. The intensity of agitations may rise and fall, but they are never absent. As long as the they continue, we will not experience lasting happiness. 

Some spiritual traditions hold that lasting happiness is to be found inside of us and only inside. Happiness is in fact our very nature. Being ignorant of this, we seek it outside. Instead, we must turn our gaze inside. Only by knowing 'our true selves', can we be free of the endless struggle to find happiness. 'One who knows the Self crosses over grief (tarati shokam aatmavit)', as the Chandogya Upanishad (7.1.3) declares. How does one come to 'know' the Self? That's a topic for another day!