Every year, without fail, December brings forth some Christmas cheer, a nip in the air (unless you live in Mumbai), and a determined effort by corporations to psychoanalyse you. Your music streaming service, your e-book reader, your podcast player: Every company that has mined your data for the last 11 months, now delivers (a fraction of) its findings to you — the “year-end wrap” — with a pretty bow on top. There is something alluring about these reports; perhaps because they appeal to our need to understand ourselves — the same need, in fact, that compels us to take personality quizzes.
Much like a year-end wrap, you can never ignore a personality quiz. As you scroll through the endless expanse of content on your social media timeline, they call out to you every time you encounter them — the Sirens to your Odysseus. They stay your thumb and you pause to consider the profound questions they pose: What Type Of Pancake Are You?, An Ogre? A Fairy? A Witch? Let’s Find Out Which Fantasy Creature You Are, Are You A Moth Or A Butterfly?, and so on. You can try to swipe them away but the hook only sinks deeper.
Curiosity, after all, is an essential human instinct. Know thyself, the ancient Greeks had urged us. Today, that existential endeavour means waiting for Spotify to reveal your top five songs (at least two of which will surprise you), and taking a quiz to learn what the winter food you embody says about you.
For most of human history, this quest for knowledge — and pursuit of self-discovery — was the preserve of the privileged. Later, even as psychology and behavioural sciences became part of the public discourse in the 20th century, the subject retained an academic flavour. The typical personality tests offered a potpourri of alphabets as results — ENFJ, ISTP, Type A, Type B — which were more likely to confound than enlighten. People needed simpler and more accessible ways to understand themselves, and with the coming of the new millennium, the internet delivered.
In the West, part entertainment and part popular psychology personality quizzes regularly featured in lifestyle magazines. But it was in the digital world that these quizzes truly flourished. The world wide web democratised the personality test. With a shared online idiom and common pop-culture experiences, users in Nepal could now take quizzes crafted by contributors in New York. That these quizzes could turn any manner of animal, person, or thing into a psychometric tool only helped further their appeal. Indeed, Freud would have drawn a sharp breath and uttered a startled oath if he could see how a modern-day quiz can psychoanalyse someone based on their favourite Game of Thrones character.
Yet, there has been one glaring gap in the repertoire of these personality tests; one fatal omission in their toolkit, that is never as relevant as when the year-end holiday season looms: An assessment of what our style of travel photography can reveal about our nature.
As any keen student of human behaviour knows, there are four types of traveller-photographers. First, you have the selfie-takers, a phylum whose primary activity is self-evident. The selfie-taker lives by the dictum that there is no scenic locale that cannot benefit from having his face added to it. (As a child, he wanted to carve his name into wet cement.) The selfie-taker is independent and self-sufficient. He is known to have never passed a mirrored surface without stealing a glance at his reflection. He is renowned for his perseverance and optimism, spending years, in the case of this writer at least, in the futile attempt to find an angle where his nose does not resemble a blob of plasticine.
The second group of traveller-photographers are those who take pictures of everything. As fans of the Lord of the Rings may remember, Boromir once described them as the “Great Eye” that is “ever watchful”. Their roving gaze captures all. No frame is beneath them, no vista not worth clicking. They are thorough and meticulous. In university, their notes helped an entire class graduate. They can find beauty in the mundane. Every time they begin narrating an anecdote, a haunted look appears in the eyes of their audience, who, after 40 minutes, can be seen tottering away with stunned expressions on their faces. They tend to be hoarders and spend a fortune on cloud storage subscription fees.
If you’re partial to video, then you belong to the third category. You are a person of action; the stolidity of still photography is not for you. You are energetic and expressive. You always put family first. At every tourist attraction, you start a video call and swivel on the spot like the beacon of a lighthouse, to share a panoramic view with your relatives. You are confident and never perturbed by the glares of fellow tourists as you couple your videos with boisterous commentary. You can find joy in the simple things — like someone tripping and falling down a staircase — as long as you are able to record them.
The fourth and final species of traveller-photographers are the elites, the maestros of the craft: Those brandishing digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras. The DSLR-bearer has a reputation for being cerebral, even a touch nerdy. She does not believe in half-measures. Once she chooses a path, she commits to it with passion and vigour. She wears her identity with pride — quite literally, in fact, as the digital camera, with its cyclopean lens, hangs from her neck at all times. She is aloof and keeps her distance from the plebeian masses, like tourists with phone cameras, but she will occasionally offer them an indulgent smile. She is often pensive, perhaps lost in ruminations about whether she should sell her kidney to buy a new telephoto lens. Her clothes have many pockets.
So this December, when you are busy clicking pictures at a holiday destination and thinking about what your fitness app’s “year in review” says about you, feel free to consult this guide to gain further insights into your personality. After all, who better to tell you who you are than someone on the internet?
Banerjee is a Mumbai-based lawyer and writer
