Saturday 27 July 2013
Sunday 7 July 2013
Passport photographs
During one of my trips to Chennai, my father showed me a brochure. The "class of 61" at the Engineering College of Guindy, Madras (then) had had a reunion and in commemoration of that event, they had brought out this brochure. As I leafed through the book, one section caught my eye. It had the passport photographs of all the students in their final year at Guindy and right beside each photograph was another passport photograph which showed how the same student looked now... after 50 years!!
The next hour was simply unadulterated entertainment!! We scrutinised each photograph and saw how time had morphed each candidate beyond recognition! On one side was the chiseled face of a handsome young man with bright eyes, a hint of baby stubble, a healthy hairline and luscious hair- falling in waves over his forehead. Next to it was a creature which stared back at you...with a shining, bald pate, a furrowed brow, a double chin and a perpetual scowl! The two images couldn't have been farther apart... and we joked that even if they had made an error and interchanged a candidate's recent photograph with someone else's, we just wouldn't have known!!
You need 3 passport photographs for anything and everything- right from renewing your driver's license to applying for a new SIM card. That's when you rummage through all the shelves at home. Invariably, you will find exactly 2 recent passport photographs. The 3rd photograph is always a "stamp sized photograph" if at all you find one. We have no idea why we even buy these stamp sized photographs. No one ever wants them and seeing a dozen of them strewn all over... and completely useless, only increases your frustration. Sometimes, you do find a 3rd passport photograph....only it is from a different set. You cannot submit this photograph with the other two. Moreover, this photograph is from a previous avatar- when you sported frills in your hair, a ghastly moustache and long side burns.. all of which makes you look positively silly! You wonder how the world even tolerated this appearance.
"I am going to get a 100 passport photographs so that we never run out of them!" you slam the door and storm out of home. However, getting a passport photograph leaves you with a dented ego... as the years go by. You are unsure whether to smile at the camera or wear a solemn expression. Either way, you are condemned. If you smile, someone looks at the photographs and breaks into convulsive laughter. He somehow seems to confirm your own assessment that the photograph borders on the ridiculous.
If you pose with a poker face, you hear a comment a home, "You look like a robber! Couldn't you have smiled a bit at least?" One look at the photograph... and you see how accurate the analysis is! You wonder why the hairline has suddenly receded... much like sea tide.. and exposed so much of real estate! You blame it on a bad haircut, but that's seldom true. The eyes are either staring at the camera in a ghoulish fashion, or half closed... as if you are addicted to charas (dope)!
In a way, you are thankful that you got only 16 of these passport photographs (plus two dozen stamp sized of course) and not 100 as originally planned. That would have been a total disaster.. and seeing these frightful photographs at home, would have been one more reason for perpetual insomnia!!
There is one interesting point to note though- these very photographs will look "young" and "dapper", when you pose for the next set of passport photographs the following year!! You can well imagine how those turn out!
Many years ago, Don Bosco High School brought out its own annual brochure with the passport photographs of all the prize winners. An impeccable magazine normally... but that year, two egregious errors were committed. They missed PV Biju's photograph and left that spot vacant in the magazine with only his name typed at the bottom.
The second mistake was worse- instead of having Suresh's photograph, they published the brochure with Suresh's name, but with Rajeev's photograph. Rajeev donated a "full page advertisement" from his father's company all right... but he was definitely not a prize winner and should have never been on that page.
The school decided to make amends to fix this error. One fine afternoon, the class monitor went around the class distributing two black-and-white photographs- one was PV Biju's and the other was Suresh's. The order from the Vice Principal over the public address system was simple- we had to take these photographs home... take out the brochure... and stick them to the correct spots with Fevicol!! Noble intent all right, but the execution was bound to fail.
Students used their imagination to the fullest. Even before Biju's photograph had been distributed, the students had populated the vacant spot in the brochure with their own creation- some with a caricature of a donkey (and had even labelled it as "gadha kahin ka") and still others with pictures of monkeys and human heads with all kinds of oddities!
Suresh was never a popular student. He was perceived as a nasty book worm, a teacher's pet and a general nuisance to the student society at large. It gave the students a forum to express their choice feelings for Suresh... they tore the passport photograph.. into as tiny bits as possible... and either consigned him to the waste paper basket... or flung these bits to the fan whirring at full blast in the classroom!
Boys.. will after all.. be boys!!
The next hour was simply unadulterated entertainment!! We scrutinised each photograph and saw how time had morphed each candidate beyond recognition! On one side was the chiseled face of a handsome young man with bright eyes, a hint of baby stubble, a healthy hairline and luscious hair- falling in waves over his forehead. Next to it was a creature which stared back at you...with a shining, bald pate, a furrowed brow, a double chin and a perpetual scowl! The two images couldn't have been farther apart... and we joked that even if they had made an error and interchanged a candidate's recent photograph with someone else's, we just wouldn't have known!!
You need 3 passport photographs for anything and everything- right from renewing your driver's license to applying for a new SIM card. That's when you rummage through all the shelves at home. Invariably, you will find exactly 2 recent passport photographs. The 3rd photograph is always a "stamp sized photograph" if at all you find one. We have no idea why we even buy these stamp sized photographs. No one ever wants them and seeing a dozen of them strewn all over... and completely useless, only increases your frustration. Sometimes, you do find a 3rd passport photograph....only it is from a different set. You cannot submit this photograph with the other two. Moreover, this photograph is from a previous avatar- when you sported frills in your hair, a ghastly moustache and long side burns.. all of which makes you look positively silly! You wonder how the world even tolerated this appearance.
"I am going to get a 100 passport photographs so that we never run out of them!" you slam the door and storm out of home. However, getting a passport photograph leaves you with a dented ego... as the years go by. You are unsure whether to smile at the camera or wear a solemn expression. Either way, you are condemned. If you smile, someone looks at the photographs and breaks into convulsive laughter. He somehow seems to confirm your own assessment that the photograph borders on the ridiculous.
If you pose with a poker face, you hear a comment a home, "You look like a robber! Couldn't you have smiled a bit at least?" One look at the photograph... and you see how accurate the analysis is! You wonder why the hairline has suddenly receded... much like sea tide.. and exposed so much of real estate! You blame it on a bad haircut, but that's seldom true. The eyes are either staring at the camera in a ghoulish fashion, or half closed... as if you are addicted to charas (dope)!
In a way, you are thankful that you got only 16 of these passport photographs (plus two dozen stamp sized of course) and not 100 as originally planned. That would have been a total disaster.. and seeing these frightful photographs at home, would have been one more reason for perpetual insomnia!!
There is one interesting point to note though- these very photographs will look "young" and "dapper", when you pose for the next set of passport photographs the following year!! You can well imagine how those turn out!
Many years ago, Don Bosco High School brought out its own annual brochure with the passport photographs of all the prize winners. An impeccable magazine normally... but that year, two egregious errors were committed. They missed PV Biju's photograph and left that spot vacant in the magazine with only his name typed at the bottom.
The second mistake was worse- instead of having Suresh's photograph, they published the brochure with Suresh's name, but with Rajeev's photograph. Rajeev donated a "full page advertisement" from his father's company all right... but he was definitely not a prize winner and should have never been on that page.
The school decided to make amends to fix this error. One fine afternoon, the class monitor went around the class distributing two black-and-white photographs- one was PV Biju's and the other was Suresh's. The order from the Vice Principal over the public address system was simple- we had to take these photographs home... take out the brochure... and stick them to the correct spots with Fevicol!! Noble intent all right, but the execution was bound to fail.
Students used their imagination to the fullest. Even before Biju's photograph had been distributed, the students had populated the vacant spot in the brochure with their own creation- some with a caricature of a donkey (and had even labelled it as "gadha kahin ka") and still others with pictures of monkeys and human heads with all kinds of oddities!
Suresh was never a popular student. He was perceived as a nasty book worm, a teacher's pet and a general nuisance to the student society at large. It gave the students a forum to express their choice feelings for Suresh... they tore the passport photograph.. into as tiny bits as possible... and either consigned him to the waste paper basket... or flung these bits to the fan whirring at full blast in the classroom!
Boys.. will after all.. be boys!!
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