So, it was the summer of 2007…no, wait, let me back up a bit. Apparently, Aishwarya Sampath (a Facebook friend) put up a photo of her from back in 2007 and asked, rhetorically of course, why we shouldn’t be putting up our selfies from back in the days when we were young and restless (or something to that effect).
I have a story. And it is this: When I got my first divorce back in 2011, I set up a fresh home, kind of a bachelor’s pad, close to the golf course, and reset my life. I used to have a lot of photo frames (I love pictures around the house), but they now needed new pictures without any association with my past. That should have been easy, given that we are a camera-crazy family (my father left me 8 military-style trunks and a few Delseys full of photos to clear after his passing). It was surprisingly tough. It seemed I had almost no photographs of myself alone! I could find a few and had to leave most frames empty (there’s another rather thrilling story of a date who was freaked out by it and suspected me to be a serial killer, leading to a very Hrishikesh-Mukherjee-film-like misunderstanding, but I shall save that for later) till I clicked some later.
Anyway, long story short (ha!), I have very few solo photos of my years from about 19 to 42, and only when I became a prolific social media person in my early 40s did I start snapping off the vanity selfies, which I revel in now, much to the consternation of quite a few well-wishers who’d rather I act my age (whatever that means).
But back to the other story. Aishwarya posted one of hers from 2007. And so, here’s one of mine, at Jebel Hafeet, with the wind in my (rather thick and substantial) hair, wearing a cowboy belt, boots, bell bottoms, and checked Marlboro shirt, with a wedding band on my finger and my Raybans in my breast pocket, posing in front of Swarup’s (my college friend who was also in Dubai) car with nary a care in the world. That’s me. Or at least was me. Make what you will of it.
