Rains, reels, and remembrance

Further recollection led to the realisation that it is not abnormal to see the majority of the populace document everything from concerts, meals with friends, post-workout delirium, emotional breakdowns, and even the arrival of metros or flights; all to be broadcast to audiences large or small, and in almost every case, to be filed away in a camera roll.

As every remotely extraordinary moment—and some mundane experiences—becomes fodder for personal feeds, entire industries have mushroomed around preparing faces for the faces they meet. Yet, as moments become (or are orchestrated to be) “Instagrammable”, one is jolted into acknowledging that curation has seeped not just into identity, but also into the fundamentally human act of remembering.

The human race has always been drawn to the allure of commemoration. Curiously, the curation instinct has also evolved simultaneously. Cavemen left murals on walls. Pharaohs adorned their tombs with hieroglyphs depicting themselves as gods (a political strategy with surprising longevity).

Tutankhamun’s tomb, depicting his glory and grand journey into the afterlife, snaps into context with the discovery that the man—or rather, the boy—behind the gilded mask was barely 19. Closer to modern times, as the very first photographs emerged, so did techniques to retouch them through scratching out imperfections on the negatives and painting over them—Queen Victoria was photoshopping her pictures centuries ahead of time.

However, the fundamental shift in the digital age is that curation can happen at any stage—before or after the act of commemoration. Brides today hire photographers offering social media packages, then spend eons ensuring that a lehenga twirls perfectly in a five-second reel.

Graduates throw their hats repeatedly until physics synchronises with aesthetics. Glasses are clinked together multiple times to capture the perfect “cheers” moment. Afterwards, pockmarks vanish from skin, hairlines defy time itself, and, if desired, people themselves disappear from photographs.

Moreover, until recently, while commemoration was widespread, curation remained the preserve of the upper echelons, industries dedicated to engineering images, and museum curators. But today, waistlines can be narrowed with sliders, jawlines can be sharpened as desired, puppy ears can morph onto a face, and the golden hour can be summoned at will by anyone with a smartphone.

As such a manicured digital archive swells, the blemishes of memory itself are quietly concealed beneath an Instagram filter. And as countless snippets and snaps of café food, fleeting weather phenomena, boarding passes, and sunsets accumulate, the very flavour of memory begins to dilute.

I am thus left to wonder—as the very act of remembering is increasingly mediated by platforms, enough to make “Instagrammable” a word requiring no explanation—what will the digital age itself be archived as?

Will a future historian have to sift through millions of reels on a single trend, filtered selfies, and rain snaps before arriving at a representative vignette of our time? Or will the third decade of the twenty-first century simply resemble a towering mountain of engineered candids and meticulously polished moments?

Even for those who document memories only for private commemoration, will the abundance of opportunities to curate quietly mould recollection itself, until no one quite remembers what actually happened?

If one imagines a museum a century hence, two possibilities emerge. Perhaps humanity’s collective camera roll populates a gallery dedicated to it. With its sheer volume, it could very well be the greatest historical archive ever assembled. 

Or, perhaps it sits in storage, catalogued not under civilisation, but under the platforms that defined it.