Camera in my Mind

There have been so many times in India where I wish I had a camera somehow connected to my mind -- such that with an intentional blink, it could store a photo in a digital database. My ride to work this morning was one of those times.

It was just an instant, a split second of staring mindlessly out the window. A bright orange but sun-faded house -- the color of a building you'd only really see in India or Latin America. An old man, white hair, wrinkled and proud face, walking with a wooden walking stick, slowly but deliberately towards the door of the sun-faded orange house. My car stops in traffic -- there's a cow ahead, and the old man stops, facing the door and slowly turning the knob.

Over his white linen clothes, he is draped in a light orange cloth. In the middle of his back, the cloth has a darker orange symbol -- the Hindu swastika sign for good luck, which has none of the evil connotations here that it does in the west.

Sun shining down in mid-morning light, dark orange good luck symbol matching the framed sun-kissed house, proud old man entering his humble abode... this is the photo I'm taking with my mind's eye.