A camera that once did all the work and now refuses to is the entire situation of Balachandran V's "Out of Focus," and it turns out to hold a good deal more than a complaint about faulty equipment. The poem is dated Trivandrum, 19.11.2013, which gives it the feel of a diary entry, a thought jotted down on an ordinary day. Its central idea is how to go on living with something that no longer works as it should: accepting the blur without quite giving up on clarity.
The opening stanza reads like a page from a user manual. "Switch it on, point, press" is three quick commands, each a single beat, and the rhythm mimics the effortlessness it describes. The camera "focuses on its own," which makes it sound almost self-reliant, and the final line, "All you have to do is to press down all the way," promises that nothing could be easier. That confidence is there so the next stanza can undercut it.
"Of late" is the hinge. The machine's independence is replaced by human labour: "I pull the focus ring manually, forward and backward." The line is long and the motion in it goes back and forth, like the fiddling it describes, and it ends in failure: "It never focuses sharply." There is no exclamation and no anger, only a flat report. Notice also that "focus" appears five times across these first two stanzas and then vanishes. Once the speaker stops expecting it to work, the word itself drops out of the poem.
The third stanza is resignation, delivered with a dry shrug: "guess I will have to live / With images blurred." The line break matters. "Live" hangs at the end of one line and "With" opens the next, so the blur seems to attach itself to living in general, not just to photography. The poem never says the camera stands for eyesight, memory, or a body that is wearing down, but its vocabulary of "live" and "life" invites that reading. The joke that follows, a new camera "is not an option / Till the next life, if there is one," turns a budget decision into a metaphysical one. The phrase "not an option" belongs to forms and shop counters, and setting it against eternity is wryly funny. Still, the humour feels like a way of keeping sadness at arm's length.
In the fourth stanza the speaker does what the first stanza's camera used to do, only now by hand and with care. "I do take out my camera everyday" sets up a daily ritual, and the verbs are small and domestic: "brush it," "blow away the dust," "tweak it here and there." It is the tenderness of someone tending a thing they can't bring themselves to abandon, even though the repairs are probably pointless. The last line of the stanza holds the poem's quiet paradox: "Imagine sharp and clear images." This is the only place after stanza two where sharpness returns, and it exists only in the mind. The lens has failed, so imagination does the focusing.
Then comes a single line, alone: "One day, it might snap back to life." The isolation on the page makes it feel like a held breath. "Snap" carries a double meaning, since it is both what a photographer does and what a bent or stretched thing does when it springs back into shape. The word "might" keeps the hope honest. This is not a promise, and the poem doesn't pretend the camera will be fixed. It ends, appropriately, without a sharp resolution.
The form supports this modesty. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, just plain, mostly short words in the cadence of ordinary speech. Stanzas of three, three, four and four lines shrink to one, as if the poem were narrowing down to its last thread of hope.
The poem is significant for what it avoids. It makes no grand statement about age, loss or perseverance. It lets a cheap, dusty object carry those ideas and trusts the reader to notice them. Its answer to a failing instrument is not despair or a miraculous cure but a daily habit of care and a little imagination.