The algorithm demands its tribute. Today, it’s nostalgia.
Bhagyashree—the woman who defined a specific brand of 80s innocence—just hit the "post" button on a curated gallery of maternal affection. It’s her son Abhimanyu’s birthday. Naturally, the internet reacted with the predictable warmth of a lithium-ion battery under heavy load. The headline? "You changed my life." It’s sweet. It’s sentimental. It’s also a masterclass in the commodification of the family photo album.
We call these "unseen photos." It’s a clever bit of linguistic friction. In the age of the cloud, nothing is truly unseen; it’s just waiting for the right moment to be monetized for engagement. These images existed on a flash drive or a private server for years. Now, they’re public-facing assets. They’ve been pulled from the digital ether to feed the "Like" economy.
Don’t get me wrong. The sentiment is likely real. I’m sure Abhimanyu did change her life. Children tend to do that. But in the current tech ecosystem, a life-changing event isn’t an experience—it’s a content pillar.
Look at the mechanics of the post. It’s a carousel. Instagram loves carousels. The more you swipe, the longer you stay on the app. The longer you stay, the more Meta can tell its shareholders that "time spent" is up. It’s a feedback loop fueled by baby photos and blurry memories. We aren't just celebrating a birthday; we’re participating in a data-harvesting ritual.
The friction here is the price of the "private" life. For a legacy celebrity like Bhagyashree, the transition to the digital-first world requires a constant sacrifice of the personal. To stay relevant in a feed that refreshes every three seconds, you have to offer up the "unseen." You have to prove you’re human by showing the parts of your life that haven't been touched by a professional lighting crew. It’s a performance of authenticity.
The irony is thick. We use $1,200 smartphones to look at low-res photos from 1995. We scroll past a mother’s profound declaration of love while waiting for a YouTube ad to finish its five-second countdown. The context is gone. The sentiment is flattened by the UI. One second you’re looking at a grainy photo of a toddler, the next you’re being served a sponsored post for a crypto scam or a "revolutionary" new blender.
Abhimanyu, an actor himself, understands the grind. He’s part of the new guard that knows a birthday isn’t just a cake and a song. It’s an opportunity to optimize the brand. It’s a "collab" with your own history. If your mom doesn’t post a heartfelt reel with a trending audio track, did you even turn a year older?
The tech press usually ignores this stuff. They think it’s "fluff." They’re wrong. This is the frontline of how we use technology to mediate our most intimate relationships. We’ve outsourced our memories to a California-based corporation that prioritizes "meaningful social interaction" only insofar as it can be converted into an ad impression.
We’ve traded the dusty shoebox of photos for a glowing rectangle that demands fresh blood daily. The "unseen" is now a currency. We spend it to buy another day of relevance. We spend it to remind the world that we once existed in three dimensions, before we were compressed into a series of pixels and served to a million strangers.
It’s a high price to pay for a birthday wish. But hey, at least the engagement numbers look good.
Does anyone actually remember the photos five minutes after the swipe, or are we just programmed to hit the heart icon as a Pavlovian response to the word "son"?