Memories & Memorabilia

Memorabilia

I love to hoard and I have collected a lot of stuff over the years. All the letters, cards that I have ever received ever since my school days, autograph books from my teachers and fellow students who passed out Std. X with me, our old board games and my book of creation (I call it that because, there are sketches of organs to animals to dress designs, doodling and writing… most of which made sense to me at the point when I created those I guess... now I just don’t know). Why I even have the entry slip to the Parliament House from 1993!

I don’t know why I want to hoard. I mean, I almost never ‘see’ these boxes even though I must have looked at them numerous times over the years. Big price for ‘memories’ in a place like Mumbai where real estate prices are always…. well sky-rocketing. However, I just cannot seem to stop.

I always thought that whenever I would encounter the problem of not being able to store my new acquisitions, I would sort some of what my parents call ‘useless stuff’ from my ‘wonder years’. When I did that a few days ago to make place for the ‘arms’ of my new-found hobby, I was surprised at what I found.

Being a very organized person bordering on OCD, the letters and cards have always been sorted year-wise. There were some letters from unknown senders… I have no clue who they are from today but I figure I did then and I was not at all alarmed by the contents as I was now. I mean a postcard made in France with leopards and a line that I should ‘flock with these leopards in Masamba, Kenya’ signed by UKNOWWHO (this is 1991, way before Harry Potter and Lord Voldermort), should have been a cause for concern but somehow I had not even complained about it.

There were quite a few letters & cards from people who I cannot put a face to right now. I had scores of pictures because of my love for photography but I could not recognize all the people in the photographs. Yet my pose in the pictures seemed to indicate that I was having a splendid time. 

I decided to embark on a small exercise of putting the names to the faces and to the unknown senders… at least for a few of them. Thanks to Google and Facebook, I could come up with a few names out of my list.

Although, I could not remember every bit of the events and the people in those photographs, the events themselves had created some happy memories and that is what I would like to remember and renew.  I made a note to self - I must renew the older memories which have given me moments of happiness, more frequently. So dear friends, if you hear from me after what looks to be a really long time, it is just me on my ‘renewing’ mode. Do share with me how you preserve your memories.