Those whirring home movies

Part of our childhood memories is that of our family sitting in the darkened living room, watching the wall light up with projected memories of home movie film accompanied by the whirring of the movie projector.  What did we watch? Images of our birthday party, our outing to the Lalbagh park or the zoo, a building project, ride on the motorbike. Fragments of our childhood, captured, and revisited by our family, strengthening the bonds between us with unfeigned glee and shared laughter.

The whirr of the projector has now faded into oblivion with the advent of new technology. The plasma screen has expanded to such a gargantuan size that it has now annexed all space and attention in the living rooms of today. What do families watch today? The offerings that are made on commercial channels now feed our brains, and more importantly becomes the childhood memories for our children. Really? Is that what we want them to remember?

Together times are now compartmentalized, and individuality has erected walls between siblings and parents, carefully cloaked as the characteristic cool of generation X. I dread to see generation Y.  No more are rituals of remembered family memory celebrated and revisited. Cartoon network, CNN, Hallmark, and Jay Leno are the conductors of our evenings, playing their scores to numbed brains.

Can we shatter this commercial shell? Even with todays technology, it is easy to capture the growing moments and record it for posterity, to be revisited, replayed as our children grow, reminders of the love and the bonds that undergird the family. How many families do this? Digital photographs can easily be made into slideshows and with the click of a button set to music.  All at no cost at all except the effort of creation.

America’s funniest home videos was a refreshing change from commercialization, bring the focus back on families.

The bottom line being not even the movie, or the technology, but the family in its ritual of celebrating each other and a shared commonality, however we choose to do it.