Inking your memories!

It’s that back to school week and we are rushing completing assignments and projects at the nth hour as is the norm in our household. My daughter screams that the printer cartridge has run out of ink! She was midway printing the project on memories of the vacation she had. The vacation image came out with half the Chinese fishing net picture we took.

Ink has always been associated with memories. It was always a nice feeling to smell ‘Brill’ ink on your answer sheets provided it was a History paper and you knew the answers well. They would simply flow and smell so good…unfortunately by the time it reaches the teacher who corrected, it would turn dry and would be overpowered with the fresh red ink smell imprinting far less marks than what you expected. Ink on inland letters smelt of exchange of emotions between loved ones. Ink in an early morning newspaper smelt of the joys and sorrows of the world around us. The inked emotions in an autograph book smelt of memories even after decades.  Finally we waited until we turned 18 for that spot of indelible ink on our finger nails and would proudly display our role in electing the governance, but the life of it was also only a couple of weeks.

And then it happened. The young started to ink their bodies. Though history of this practice could be traced as far as ancient Egyptian mummies, today we see millennials all for inking themselves. The irony is that though they belong to a generation of shortened attention / interest spans and lead a life lead by the pleasures of instant gratifications they find great pride to flaunt their body parts indelibly inked with permanent images and symbols of their instant experiences or their instant expression of love. An engagement ceremony these days happen in Tattoo parlors.

They do not realize a ring is far easier to be done away with than tattoo. ‘I do’ has made way to ‘I ink’! But when we said ‘I do’ it was followed by ‘until death do us apart’. With ‘I Ink’ these days it can also mean even death cannot do us apart. Yeah you heard it right. Even though the relationships today do not last the drying time required for a tattoo, people now want to be connected to their loved ones after they are gone by having a Memorial Tattoo. A pinch of the funerary ash of your loved one mixed in ink is all that you need to get you connected. The world continues to amaze me every single day with the level of craziness it is capable of throwing at me!

It is easy to ink your lady’s name if it is a ‘Priya’ and later on when a Russian ‘Yanka’ walks into your life, you simply amend the tattoo and make it 'Priyanka' in the ‘Nick’ of time.  So before inking each other’s names please choose a partner with an amendable name and even death cannot do you apart!

 From Dust we came and to tattoo we return!