An old photograph..worth a thousand thoughts

Yesterday while flipping through an old book I came across a really old photograph. I'm always fascinated by old photographs. If you smell them, mostly there's a waft to them too. An old photograph can be so telling in some ways and yet again so mysterious too. Though it gives me plenty of time for idle speculation on what the occasion for the picture would have been, how their live styles were. Its great fun to find out about the ancestry and the lineage of the family from the photograph too.

An occasion for a photograph in those days would have been something grand, and everyone would pose in their best and yet there s always that stray look, or smile that is telling about a person :) A peek into some family from somewhere. I wonder if those in the photograph had had a good life & whether things had turned out the way they had expected them to be. Whether the relations or the friends with whom, the photo had been clicked had finally stuck or if life had taken them in different ways. The lady of the house, before clicking posing for the picture, had she preened at herself in the mirror..had she smiled a shy smile? had the small children been terribly bored as they were dragged around to face the camera...And also I smile as I think whether any one of them had even remotely thought that their picture from whenever would land in the hands of a complete stranger who would speculate about them.

Old photographs from your own family of course are a different story altogether. You know what their stories have been like. You know the path they have trodden. And yet even in these known stories, one cannot but muse whether their lives were same or different from what they tried to make it to be.

( Image courtesy Google)