Well, she was right
I have hundreds of CDs and DVDs at home. Remember the shiny colourful ones? They have 8000+ movies, TV series and documentaries on them. In my showcase locker, they are collecting dust as none of them have gone on a date with a ROM since 2010. When i was busy burning them, i thought i was doing so for the sake of posterity, to watch stuff later when i’ll be older or may be out of internet or something. I was involved weekend in and weekend out. Download-Watch-Burn was my life’s motto. As one can guess, i was single as fuck. Everybody who knew about my collection appreciated it because i was generous in lending them. My amma was the only known critic of this practice. According to her, i was wasting time and money on something useless. Even though she didn’t understand anything about computers, she could figure out that given my track record, if i am showing too much dedication to an act, it means only one thing: I am wasting my time and money. Turns out she was right. Just like she was right about my fascination with body art. I got my first tattoo in 2011 and my last one in 2014. 33 tattoos in total. An average of 8 tattoos per annum. Ridiculous is the word that dominates my mind when i think of them. Then again, my amma was the sharpest critic in this case too. She just couldn’t bear to see my skin swollen or me feverish, recovering from “gaaya” (Tulu for wounds), unable to even wear t-shirt on my own, let alone bathe properly at times. Ironic as it was, she was my go-to person to get silver sulphadiazine applied on my tattoos, especially on my back. A healing process but not without hearing her lectures on how i am making myself weaker by going through unnecessary pain. I never took her seriously. Until i did. That phase kickstarted in 2015, post my move northwards to Gurgaon. A barrage of health issues followed and some of them still continue to this day. It’s difficult to connect this decline with what’s on my skin today but there is a pattern in there. What’s interesting though is the fact that we see things more clearly only in the past. Do i regret all those disks i’m never going to use again? Not really but yes, it was a blatant act of wastage. Not that i’d have used my resources more effectively somewhere else because it wasn’t about money for me. It was about cinema. Do i regret getting myself inked all over? Again, not really, but yes, i don’t really see the point in the mirror anymore. I stopped noticing my tattoos long time back. They are just there greying—with time, black ink gives way to a gloomier shade — and waiting to be noted. Like me.
