Spoken word, performed at the Bangalore International School Poetry Slam in November 2017.

To Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, founders of Snapchat -

You guys should be awarded the Physics Nobel for proving that time dilation actually occurs, your app makes us feel that ten minutes, six times a day does not equal one hour.

You guys are the publishers of fictional stories in an imaginary book, while the diaries of our lives are empty,

You have fabricated a pocket prison, where the bars are fashioned from our own insecurity and where the cells hold memories of the present hostage to an insatiable beast of validation.

You have made us become something between the walking dead and the buried alive, zombies that feast on the rotting brain of a society where everyone is so busy in showcasing that they have a life, that they forget to live it.

You have made us forget

How

To gaze into the rain and have your fears drowned by a million drums, where the pattering splatter of drops on the rooftop chant a mantra of forgiveness, when you can swaddle yourself in a cocoon of familiarity and sway in a hammock of nostalgia with a yellow paged book and mom’s pakodas for company

Instead

we immerse ourselves in the fickle, flickering heat in our palms, as we look through the wrong screen of glass.

You have made us blind

To the beauty of the sky when it blushes as the sun kisses it goodbye, when it becomes the canvas of a toddler who with a palette of imagination and a brush of innocence paints the horizon with dreams, when we can float on the moans of the ocean as the breeze makes love to it and sink in the sweet smell of sea-salt and solitude,

Instead

we attempt to replicate this resplendent recipe and riot of hues and sounds with pale filters and YOLO captions.

Studies have shown that every time we remember something, we are merely recollecting the last time we thought of that memory. That each time we dig back into the recesses of our brain, our memories are slightly faded, a few details missing, smiles that don’t bloom butterflies, eyes that don’t spark tremors, faces like a shrinking jigsaw puzzle which we don’t know how to put together anymore. Our memories are ticking time bombs where the explosion is nothingness.

Photos and videos are bomb detonators, pickle jars of details. But that’s only when there is something to preserve, when our memories are not just about trying to embalm moments we aren’t even experiencing.

Photocopies of blank pages are blank pages.

You only live once, you don’t come back as a yellow ghost.

So live in here, not in here.