Every time I end up on the camera app,

A dozen options line up urging for a tap.

A picture clicked is deemed incomplete,

Until a filter applied or ‘delete and repeat’!

Filters are aplenty; or maybe uncountable,

Yet the need to get a perfect pic is insatiable.

Technological advancement is unidirectional,

It does nothing to a mindset that’s been distortional.

He has been hovering over me for thirty long years,

And he is the same on a rainy day or when a cloud clears.

But one extremely fine day, the weather changed;

Or maybe the filters my sight wore rearranged.

Over an emotional moment and in an intense mood,

He declared how the Indian laws are no good.

Sexual assaulters and molesters must be hung,

A filter showed how on my clothing style his concerns’ve clung.

Tenderly he rolled over his granddaughter in her sleep,

Her nappy he changed also her bedding soaked deep.

A sigh from her yielded ginger pats from a sleep deprived him,

That filter threw spotlight on his humane heart I’d considered grim.

After a long day at work, the retiree comes home

To an ailing wife struggling at chores piling as a dome.

Instantly he metamorphoses into a chef substituting her,

A filter shows him to be a real man as my watery eyes blur.

Clipped I found my wings at every career turn,

Flabbergasted I silently questioned why he was so stern.

Today when he lauds (or mocks) my writing in his own way,

It was my laziness and not capability earlier he saw was grey.

For years, I’d see him as a stubborn man;

As his daughter, a rebel I always ran.

That must have been a parallel universe, I now see.

This man, here, is everything I had failed to see!

He has been by my side for thirty short years,

I see him in new light each time a new filter nears…