The drudgeries of life

Hangovers suck! Right now, I'm suffering from one! This one is thanks to my spending a wonderful, carefree week at home! Don't know how long it'll last but I know it won't get over soon! Sighs! Now back to work...
Man's greatest invention is the mirror! A close second comes the camera!
It has become sort of a trend... every time I go home after a long hiatus, Mumma, Dada, my sis and me spend one whole evening going through a couple of dozen odd albums loaded with pics! Ranging from snaps of my parents in their late teens, their marriage photos, my childhood pics, my sis' childhood images to the present day photographs, these albums have them all! Phew! That's a helluva lot of pics! Added to them, most of the pics have comments, dates and captions inscribed on the flip side! Great job, Dad!
The wonderful part is that the four of us relive the times captured in the plethora of pictures! For instance, Dad browsing through the pics taken around the time of my parents' tying the knot with my old man, then a tall, handsome young man (which he still is :D), sporting Amitabh Bachchan's angry young man looks and a similar, if not better, hairdo! Dad will always advise me at this point to never use a hairdryer!! The sharp contrast between the mane in the pics and what was left of it in reality is enough for me to never touch the forbidden apparatus!
Next comes Mom's pics in which she's seen sporting the braided hairdo! Mumma has long hair and till I turned 8, she kept a twin braid hair style! When I was very little, I had a fascination with those braids... if I didn't hold one of each braid in my little hands, I never used to go to sleep! Poor Mumma! But hey! I have a friend who, in his childhood, never went to sleep unless he held on to his mother's ears! LoL! I had a name for braids too... Paapu! Well the word probably had its origin in a melange of Tamil, English, Hindi and kiddie lingo!
Well, I could go on and on and on! Be it about all the pics taken till when I was 7, growing up as the sole scion of my parents, or the pics taken after that period with my sis as the additional member of the clan; pics of us dating back to our early teens... an age when one always feels ugly, ill at ease, gawky; school pics, college pics; pics with family and friends; birthday pics, camping trip pics, vacation pics, etc etc etc.
As after every one of these sessions, I again wondered as to how we never became bored or grew tired of doing the same thing all over again, and that too after a gap of a measly 4 months! But I guess, my parents and sister are a nostalgic bunch as well! Can't be helped... it runs in the family!
I somehow feel pretty young, active, cheerful and happy-go-lucky! Probably it has something to do with the wonderful food I had at home; maybe it was because I feel like my Mumma and Dada's little boy again; or perhaps pulling my sis' leg after a while, though she's all grown up now and age does play spoilsport... Probably it's all of that plus the fact that I was, plain and simple, back home!

They say "Home is where the heart is"... I feel I've left mine back there!

Labels: Family, Nostalgia, Reminiscence