If Alice did not fall through the looking glass, and if Snow White’s step mother had not asked the magic mirror on the wall – the stories we live by would have been different. What was instrumental in the deep inversion of lives of these characters was none other than the mirror.The mirror – a portal, a reflector!

Often we don’t pay attention to the kind of mirror we inadvertently end up using in the larger story of our life…
The symbolic mirror held up by a good friend who opined it’s “too early for grey hair”, or the mirror held up by the cousin who believed “salt and pepper, always so classy.” Or the mirror of our dressing room where each morning our gaze greets our gaze and opines “You do what you do!” But what if the mirror is distorted? Like the convex and concave mirrors at the famous Rock garden that entertained my little one and her friends evoking amusing little moments of carefree laughter. For a moment we were bulging outward with long necks like a Brachiosauraus and the next we had eyes popping out like some alien from Mars. And what if the kids really believed that is how they looked. Perceptions and reflections go deep hand in hand, don’t they? Just like the fact that the letters don’t get reversed in the mirror, it is us who flip the letters to read it in that mirror and eventually end up reversing them but the mind believes otherwise.

Thinking of mirrors, I couldn’t help run through vignettes of my memory when I was a kid or should I say the time in sepia for all of us when an entire generation believed in covering the mirror of the dressing table with a sheet or have flap doors on the sides of the portable dressing tables to open and shut the mirror as and when wanted. Were mirrors considered superstitious or magical in their era? Or was it a simple cord cutting between their everyday movement in reality and the world of illusion they could conjure up in their time of leisure perhaps while putting up the bindi or tying the turban.

Mirrors can certainly evoke strong feelings and provoke imagination. No wonder why mirror gazing has become a popular meditative therapy. Simply sit still and look into the mirror. It will either calm the nerves by bringing you into your present or release your inner emotional turmoil in a gush of tears. After all, there is an innate desire in us humans to be seen and mirrors do exactly that. However, they have another Freudian side to it as well when they act as a self portrait that we humans like to project on the outside world. Perhaps,the same psychological fundamental that has addicted the next generation to social media.

Talking about social media, don’t you think dear reader that it is the real magical mirror that should be ritually covered with cloth?! Because logging out has failed to keep people away from it! How we love to tune into our faces; sharing and oversharing our lives in a metaverse that tip toes on a thin rope of self and construct, narratives and counter-narratives. It certainly makes for a far more fancy, complex and interesting mirror that humankind has ever had (in Freudian sense and otherwise).

And I honestly cannot help with the wonderment of what Alice’s experience would be like if she falls through this new looking glass! A dimension yet to be completely explored.