Fascination with records and figures has always been a part of my life. It was a fashion to collect stamps and coins when we were young but I had to do something different! I explored many different avenues to record-keep!
I still have the records of my height and weight with graphs from the age of 10. I was 5ft and one maund (around 37 kg) at the beginning and my height stopped at 6ft 2in. Sometime during my middle age I reached the weight of around 90 kg and then dropped back to 75 kg! Now my height has reduced to just above 6ft.This is due to the fact that the gaps in the spine and knee have reduced and also due to the curvature in the spine which is common in old age.
The other day, while rummaging through my old papers, I found an old greeting card given to my sister by her friends. It was scribbled with my signatures with date by its side. The first one was done when I was in 4th class. I have kept all of them till the signature stopped changing. It is fascinating to see the changes over time!
Having always been captivated with flying I have kept all air travels records with details of the aircraft, the place of origin and the destination and even seat numbers! Each of the boarding cards has also been preserved. Only for the time I was in England I have conserved all bus, train and hovercraft tickets along with the receipts of different hotels.
I have always been a nomad all my life, having changed jobs and places with regular frequency so this has led me to keep a record of all postings and transfers with the date which also includes the transit time! Obviously I also have all the appointment letters and certificates.
Photography was also a much loved hobby of mine. First I used to collect them and keep them in albums with caption underneath each of them, these were carefully written using stencils! Then when I bought my own camera I continued this collection religiously. I had collected a prodigious collection but many were damaged during my innumerable transfers! Some of them are being enlarged and colored by my daughters. The oldest photograph that I had was taken when I was 4 days old. Many were taken by my sis in law and she is dead (So I have no idea where she kept them). Some of the photos were stolen by my brothers.
Collection of coins and stamps occupied my attention for a short while but as everyone was doing it I lost interest! I then developed a unique collection idea- of grass flowers in old diaries. The high school students at Nagothane and a Primary school teacher in England picked this up from me. I had about 100 specimens at a time. I had taught them that this collection does not cost anything except your time.
The old photo albums with the carefully fixed photograph with small corners pasted so precisely to hold them and the small captions underneath have been taken over by the digital media. You can no longer sit outside in the winter sun flipping through these memories at your leisure; you can no longer wallow in the moments of happiness and sadness that were captured ages ago! Now in this computer age they are captured in cameras and mobiles and transferred to PCs but the old charm is not there. I tried to compile photos of different stone outcrops, sand formations, but it was not very successful.
In this new world of saving time, saving paper and saving emotions are we losing out on the finer aspects of living?
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