To Be Or Not To Be...

Musings of ... shall I say, an 'ordinary Indian life'?

Life works in mysterious ways. There are times when principles guide you into a particular action and reasonably so. But then again there comes a moral dilemma of relations. People. Humans who are related to oneself in a love hate relationship create a unique situation. Times when we forego all that we want to stand for or are willing to stand for, just to nurture that bond.

There will be a time when shadows that lead our path will fall behind. Relations left out to face themselves lost over time and space.

Photo by René DeAnda on Unsplash
This strange predicament is underlined in the cultural milieu that is India, atleast the way I have known it. Here people live, cultures flourish not guided by strong individuality, not even by reason but that love-hate thing called association.

For example, we may love or hate our neighbour, we may share a similar idea about how to go about living a lifetime or totally disagree; but we are involved with each other. This involvement is a blend of care, jealousy, provenance, emotional attachments, help, lend and even detest. But the aggregate is way more than the sum of individual ingredients. This is the spirit that guides our lives as humans; the fact that we bond irrespective of whatever (s) surrounding us!

This is society as I know it in the villages, small towns and metros being engulfed by indifference that slowly creeps in, in the form of 'development'. And amidst such a setting, I fell in love with a girl...

Those were the days when the real world was only the one talked about by elders and experienced only by them. We, the teenage lot, were guided by our own sweet concerns like; "I need to know her address and phone number..." or the more 'intellectual' one like, "Do girls feel 'love'?(Whatever that means!) She was cute by all standards of reference I see even today. I won her heart and we made it for a good 5 years or so.

But growing up brought rationalization which led to demonizing of each other and a nasty break up. However desirable that perfect girl seemed in those hazy times, she turned out to be NOT AT ALL 'the type'. Turns out she was too dumb and I was, well, an %#@hole of the highest degree, for her.

Twenty years later, I wake up each morning, with the same girl, a woman now. After those 5 years, both of us went our own way, proving some worthless point to each other. You see, it was not love that brought us together eventually. At least it wasn't only love but a love-hate thing called association. It is a blend of experiences; some extremely wonderful, some not so good and some, well, downright spiteful.

But as I had realized that there are more things to life than being intelligent and she had realized that some ...holes can still be lived with, there was a lesson. To be loved is to be hated and to be hated is also to be loved.

In an average life span, increasingly getting shorter, is there really a need to get so worked up on some adjectives before our names? I am sure each one of us is much more than what we are thought of, by us or others. It is the summing up that counts not individual bits of our personalities.

To Be or Not To Be, defined by this sum, is simply a matter of choice!

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Prashant's Solace

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