Nothing Like Old Pictures

Day 26, Sep 26, 06: Kolkata:

There’s nothing like pictures. Though yesterday was quite a boring day all together, it did have an exciting end to it. We were asked to wait a bit and our finance guy gave us our pay-checks for the month. Yippie! My first pay-check in Kolkata and the government takes quite a bit away from it too.

Apart from that, my teenage cousin is driving my aunt crazy. He didn’t come back home yesterday as he had gone out to a friends place. I realise now, how I drove my dad up the wall back then. But I guess that’s the joy of teenage life and better still for her to experience the joy of having a teenage son. A bit of high BP is mandatory for all parents; I guess it acts as a rejuvenator at that age.

Ok it seems like am making fun here, but I guess everyone’s got to go through it. It’s part and parcel of bringing up children. If you enjoyed cuddling them in your arms, you’ve got to accept the impending monsters they are going to become in these troubling adolescent years. They’re also experiencing all kinds of new feelings and also want to try thing on their own. The way here is to be tactful and handle them without losing objectivity. Ok enough about handling wild teenagers.

While my aunt was frantically making calls to Rahul, I decided to raid his toy cupboard. Aaaaah! The LEGO is still there. I took all of it out and gleefully starting putting the pieces together. I can go crazy around LEGO and Matchbox cars.

Anyway after that a post mortem till midnight on the behaviour of her son and I was off to sleep.

The morning brought on a blast from the past. While my aunt was settling one of her cupboards, I noticed some albums and decided to pull them out. That revealed a Pandora’s Box. There were dozens of them. And while I went crazy seeing pictures from when I was a tiny tot, I hit upon a brilliant idea. I’m going to start scanning and keeping all these pictures in digital format. Pictures bring back so many memories and connections to so many relatives who you don’t see that often. Stories of who is where and up to what, how they are related et al. I have to go back and devour some more of those albums. I think all this is going to work really well for the family tree I have been constructing. I’ve gone back several generations now.