Random Ramblings of a Reluctant Blogger

Whenever you come home, you are always welcome, just one thing you must not ask of me, “Show me your wedding album.”!

No it is not one of those rants on privacy nor is it any anti-big-fat-wedding theme. It is just that the album does not exist, at least, not yet!

Past the silver jubilee of a blissful wedded life, the album is still in the making. And no I am not resorting to any allegorical reference to marriage or life, it is just that the album has not materialised. In fact it has now become a running joke in the family, of course at my expense. Any delayed work gets a simile  “Oh like the wedding album.” Needless to say both my wife and my son never miss out on any chance to hurl the simile at me.

The delay, though I take the responsibility, isn’t exactly my fault. Like I said before I am not the anti-album guy, even though I doubt its lasting utility value. I mean, except for the very early days how many of us actually go back to seeing it regularly. And to think that behind every smiling, some not so smiling, faces and bling on the album lurks a well-hidden chaos. The main protagonists of the day, the bride and the groom, if not engrossed in the rituals, will just see disorder and havoc all around them, which the album shall never capture.

But I am digressing. To come back to the vexed issue, the official photographer was missing at my wedding. But that of course is not an excuse because my brother-in-law and my sisters took over, so I cannot say there were no photographs. (There was a videographer, whose oeuvre would even put  noir filmmaker to shame, but more of that later).

It is just that I had wanted the album to be different, not just a collection of photographs lined up in a lifeless display. My sister and I had already attempted, and should I say pretty successfully, with a different family album (Had a good collection of photographs given that my father was an avid shutterbug). So I had decided to give the wedding album a twist – One of its kind. And that was the stumbling block. Not the want of ideas, but the execution.

I had even collected all the photos and many even those of pre-marriage days to weave into a story, leading to and on the marriage day. A kind of a pre-wedding shoot, a fad these days. You see, I had the concept of pre-wedding shoots a couple of decades back. But then concepts, unless patented or acted upon, can only give you an unofficial bragging right.

Anyway the different album needed a different medium, the search for which provided me with an array of several hand-made notebooks, spiral binders and files all of which ended up eventually for purposes other than the wedding album.

For, every time I sat with the photographs, life pressed its fast forward button and the  project went back to its concept stage. The photographs, well preserved in a bag, which now and then see the light of the day, fail to make it to the magnum opus. I have not given up yet. But the still-in-the-making wedding album which was to tell a story, has now become a story in itself.