The life cycle of 'Humans' is rather interesting; we start with Celebrations and end up as Memorials, however in this trajectory of experiences we all finally land up as Memories.
Be it birthday celebrations for children or the Aged, we try to capture the milestones and memories which we can later reminisce about.
The larger point of debate is, how important is collecting and carrying the bag of memories which we can consume when we are emotionally starved especially in our old age and what can we do to cook memorable recipes?
In my opinion, memories are not made by sitting on a chair and watching television, one should be adventurous and stupid to create memorable moments for our later years.
If enigmatic memories could be made by artificial intelligence then we are not far from being a part of the MATRIX.
There comes a stage when our frail body is not fit for the steeplechase race or the cross country marathon, all we can do with the physical realm is to remain mentally active and reminisce about our past, end of the day, after a certain point in life, we all are left all alone with our memories only.
One of the major side effects of Ageing is; once a person is not in the seat of power or influence, he or she is typically labeled as old furniture. While on one hand, many distinguished and accomplished people have larger than life persona however there comes a time when they have to let go the reins of the race horse and let another jockey ride the white horse or the unicorn.
We all feel immortal till the time it's the high tide, but then, once the Tsunami called Old Age hits the shores we realise the importance of mortal combat.
Be it collecting Mementos or becoming a Memorial in a park, the common threads are the Memories.
To conclude, we all have a story and a movie, the point is, do we want to be remembered in our Memorial service as a Love story, an Action movie, a Horror film or a movie script which never saw the so called "lights action camera" and cut .........
Pankaj Mehrotra
