a story on #instagram

i am no expert on digital media or social media, but it’s part of environment now in most urban centres, even rural and remote places, on our planet, so one gets thoughts about it. when my space came into our lives, i started an account i remember, never quite got into it though. and then in quick succession, it was facebook, whatsapp, twitter, instagram. there was snapchat for a while, and now tiktok. for many of us, these would change our day in ways we’d never imagined.

and it would change us. or maybe, not change, but reveal sides of us we had no clue of. or even, we did, but we hid it well, and then, here was a cool, even sexy, way of making legit things we were previously encouraged to carefully conceal.

a friend of mine first told me about instagram a couple of years ago. see, you can have an account and post pictures, he said and he showed me his page. i was flummoxed. why? why would i want to do that? you can see pictures from everyone, he said. everyone? who everyone, i wondered. friends and strangers. i was lost. never could figure out why i’d want to see visuals posted by random folks out there.

if it was a matter of connecting to friends and family in far flung areas, from one’s near and distant past, wasn’t facebook already doing that? so why this? i barely looked at facebook, what would i do with instagram? twitter at least let me see some current news and reintroduced me to snark every day.

nonetheless, i got an instagram account. and in time, started to scan it regularly, and post shots now and then. soon it went beyond browsing pretty pictures. i was shopping for sarees, a great interest of mine, reading tales of fabulous wildlife, observing the sides of people that facebook, twitter, even personal interaction don’t show. last year, during one of the strangest times of my life, when i was practically in exile, my happy light chatty posts on insta helped me live through not very light things. i was genuinely grateful for the non linear, a-3D, almost parallel and curiously existent but not there space facebook and insta offered.

story. insta was the first to get it, if i’m not wrong. of course, now that facebook owns it and whatsapp, they all have the same features, and are becoming almost indistinguishable. i wish big corp thought wouldn’t homogenise so much, the little sharp ideas are so much more relevant and have meaning. and individuality, that priceless thing, why kill it off?

anyway, so now everyone has story. but the insta story somehow i think still holds sway. people seem to have much more connection to it. i rarely opened or read stories. i have missed important messaging because of that… and people don’t only post happy stuff there, there are even calls for help. a story might have saved someone i love a lot once.

the messaging in story is complex i get the feeling. why someone would not make a post of it but go for story i can’t quite figure out. something that is temporary, will disappear in twenty four hours, is passing… is that almost instinctively attractive? because whether we say it or not, whether we register it consciously or not, we know everything in life, everything, is temporary.

deep thought. or maybe it’s simply, there are some things you want to say just then, just the way it is, a thought, a feeling… and you quickly hit story, add a picture, key in something, format, and off you send it. a transient moment taking a form and flying across space to the world out there. see it if you like.

that fleetingness.

yes, it’s nice.

to hold a present moment even as it’s becoming the past, something about it.

people say all kinds of things on story, most of it is blithely inconsequential and even inane. now why am i not frowning at that? isn’t inconsequential also sometimes needed? if t weren’t, would it exist?

but yesterday when i posted one of my first stories (i’ve posted maybe one or two before), i was not thinking all this.

as i mentioned, i am into sarees. nowadays, i am trying to increase the frequency of donning them. having lost some weight over the past three years, i feel the need to capitalise on the moment, and dress up in my lovely sarees as often as i can. so yesterday, i was going for lunch and chose a pink tussar silk. i usually wear sarees in the evenings, here was a chance to take some photographs in natural sunlight.

i ran outside and got some pictures take on the phone. my photographer always shoots as she pleases, not always waiting for me to get the right smile and angle. flipping through the pictures, some pleased me, some didn’t, but they all had something shots taken indoors rarely have, unless it’s a professional shoot. the saree doesn’t swirl about, the free end, or pallu, doesn’t fly, there’s no play of saree and you. your expression is more practiced, there’s no crease on your brow thanks to the sun, no red hibiscus accidentally gets framed to the right of your head as you pose in pink.

as i looked at the pictures, i felt a need to show them to someone. yes, definitely a little exhibitionist thing there. but i wasn’t looking for “oh, beautiful” comments, i wanted to share the non stiff, playful air, the interaction with fluttering in the breeze saree, the beauty of a garment that can take you to many moods, never quite obedient and falling in line. and the fin of it.

i knew i’d post them on my saree blog (hardly anyone reads it) but i wanted to do something now. took me a couple of minutes and the story was out.

it is now about to expire. fifty three people including strangers have seen it. friends have said “oh, beautiful’ (duty bound hehe) but they’ve also sensed the fun, gotten involved for a moment, and there’s been repartee.

this is an insignificant, absolutely unimportant communication from me. yet i’m glad it happened.

did i show off? maybe.

but i know you felt a skip of lightness as you browsed. that means something, i am sure.

there will be much studying of social media, many insights, and we will keep changing along with the technologies we create. this was just a para from that experience. 

 

 posted this piece on writersbrew on february 23, 2022.

 

 

love pink?

here's in a pink nylon saree

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photos credit ferolyn fernandez

in a pink nylon saree

it was my maternal uncle’s wedding. may 1966. i was six, my cousins between four and ten. we were five of us girls i think. we were all going to attend the wedding in calcutta and then go to delhi for the reception. my grandmother, always generous, fun, a bit over the top as grandmothers really ought to be, decided to get nearly identical lehengas and sarees made for us.

the lehengas were in red silk with green cholis and red floaty odhnis, lots of shimmery gold zari all over.

the sarees were in various shades of pink. pink nylon… from a calm poised rose to a bright unstinting gulabi. and they had shiny gota work all over. ribbons of silver zari had been cut and trimmed and appliquéd in a pretty pattern on the slippery material; the silver with its cool tinsel sheen and the pink so smooth and ice cream like. they were little girls’ sarees, much shorter in both length and width than regular ones.

rajasthan is well known for gota work, my grandmother had had the sarees made in jaipur, where my grandfather’s younger brother and his wife lived. i will never forget that gaudy happy saree of mine. to me it was beautiful, absolutely perfect; in fact, now that i think of it, i wish i still had it. stays in my mind, its touch, its colour, its pattern, its gota dazzle, the springy feel of nylon.

it was my first “good saree”. not that i had a serious collection of sarees by the age of six, i did have one other saree though. a yellow cotton, which i’d worn for saraswati puja that year. children would often wear sarees for the puja dedicated to the goddess of learning. yellow being the preferred colour, though exactly why i have no idea.

but the pink and silver saree was my hot favourite. i wore it many times after my uncle’s wedding, finding all sorts of excuses to throw it on. i was also convinced i looked impossibly beautiful in it. to the credit of all those who suffered my self obsession, no one damaged my fantasy, quite happily letting me believe, yes, indeed i was gorgeous in pink sparkly nylon.

nylon. slippery and synthetic. can’t say i like the fabric at all. in the sixties though, this human made material was not only in, it may have even been a sign of a contemporary woman, one with a mind of her own even, daring to try new ideas, not just traditional silks and cottons. i don’t know if i read that right, but my mother, maternal aunts, and grandmother often wore nylon sarees; and they were all women with a modern bent of mind, tough, hard to rein in… ha. maybe that’s why i feel nylon sarees said something about the wearer’s personality. there was a very pretty one of my grandmother’s, base off white, tiny rose buds printed all across.

as i write, a thought comes along. was it my my pink nylon gota saree that was responsible for two things in more recent years?

first, when my mother turned seventy, we had a party for her and i was keen to pick up a dhakai for both of us. so i went to this lady from whom i’ve been buying dhakais for years, i chose a lovely black and white one for my mother and then my eyes fell on a pink and silver saree. i couldn’t look away.

this strawberry ice cream hued fine cotton with silver zari glittering on it… i just could not look away. i forgot my age, i forgot my million inhibitions, i had to buy it.

wore it the very next day with a blouse that didn’t match… ten years on, when the saree frayed, i sent desperate whatsapp messages to the lady, with pictures; and very kindly, she had one more made for me. almost the exact same shade.

of course, in the meantime i’d bought another one in pink, just in case this couldn’t be replicated. and i notice, i find it very hard, extremely so in fact, to stay sane when i see a pink saree. plenty of new gulabis suddenly in my cupboard. maybe as i age, a part of me is suddenly racing back, trying to pick up something from back then. catching a gota shine and dragging it here.

second, when my daughter was about six years old, i asked a dear aunt of mine, who has her own boutique, to make a saree for my daughter. there was a wedding in the family. my aunt made a wonderful saree. no, not in nylon. it was a rich blue tussar, embroidered all over, with border and pallu in… pink.

 

would like to thank a friend of mine, for reminding me of our first sarees and how a girl looks all grown up when she gets into a saree.

 

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sarees tell stories | pink dhakai from sumitra sengupta, calcutta, 2017; pink printed tussar from toontooni, calcutta, 2017; pink rajkot patola from design & drama, calcutta 2016; blue and pink tussar from raya’s boutique, calcutta, 2007.

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