It was an unforeseen moment when the narcissist in me was woken up with a rude jolt. A moment that made me wonder if the mirror at home was an incorrigible liar. That moment of dismay arrived when the postman gave a hard and impatient knock at my door a few days ago. The bespectacled man, exuding supremacy, handed over a long envelope. “Aadhaar…,” he cried, bellowed almost.
“Very important,” he added in the hushed tone of a detective. Apparently, I wasn’t just joyous but elated. “As this is an important document, I did not want to drop it outside your doorstep. I waited for you to receive it personally,” said the conscientious postman. Enormously pleased with the gratuitous smile on my face, he took his leave. I rushed in with a triumphant thud—after all I had been waiting for this moment. An Aadhaar card at last—after a grueling wait for two years! A proud accomplishment that gobbled up over a dozen of my valuable hours spent at the neighbourhood corporation counters filling up forms and getting photographed—not once…but several times. And there it arrives finally—my moment of nirvana!
Or so I thought until I opened the envelope and stared into the image on the card. The moment of nirvana turned into a startling assault that handed out an acidic punch with sour lemons. Instantly, I felt the urge to recall the pompous postman and return the card saying that it had been delivered to the wrong person. But then even the cursory glance that I took revealed that the details were bang on—all correct! No mistakes there. What punctured the glow out of my hitherto luminous eyes was the photo that had no semblance to the person it sought to represent. The bizarre face on my Aadhaar card frightened the wits out of me. This universal identity card has given me a new identity—a new face that would surely and sadly not be recognised even by my son.
Haven’t you ever (or forever) stared with disbelief and dismay at your own photographs? I mean the ones on your ration card, driving licence, voter’s identity card and so on. Strange how our administrative bodies give us an image makeover every time we apply for a document. The number of avatars that a citizen of India is made to take is all set to surpass the record set by Lord Vishnu Himself. One is not certain if the latest version of our visage on our Aadhaar card would be the final one or whether more such hallucinatory ones are in store for us.
It is truly uncanny how these all-important documents of identity display photographs that barely resemble the persons concerned.
Stranger it gets when one wonders as to how such derisory feats are managed in this age of explosive innovation that permeates digital photography!