Life is an illusion

April 03, 2026

My devices were screaming at me - cloud is full. Your all of 5 GB of data is full.

Today was the day. I tied my hair and sat cleaning up the memory.

I don't know what other people do - I use same apple id for phone and laptop. And hence am limited by 5 gb. When one is under the illusion that one is master photographer or one feels the need to capture all events - or rather things and screen shots, photos will cross 1000.

So I sat and kept transferring photos to disk and deleting them from cloud. Then I kept looking at myself - like a proper woman. Looking at my own photos across different decades, houses, stages and phases.

The little girl in a dance recital wearing a shirt and dhoti, the girl in 10th class photo, the girl wearing a saree with a little son, a woman standing in front of a temple where the kid is sitting and playing, a woman just 10 years ago smiling - but not-old, not defeated, not frustrated. And then photos of today which are painful to look at.

So I am the witness who has seen all these girls-women. I am the witness who has seen her pain, pleasures, her excitement, her faults. I am the witness who was always with her.

A load of BS - right? But I still feel sad for these photos - and the person in them. No, not for losing my youth. For becoming so helpless.

But there is also some good thing about these 1000 photos. We rarely take photos of ourselves when we are sad - we try to smile. So when browsing them we remember the good aspects of the past, not unhappy events.

So I AM doing something right.

Let us look at some memories.

Apartment life.