When love and hate collide

Aah! You’ll probably gasp in joy as you read the title and for an instance close your eyes and go through the Def Leppard song. I remember being an ardent listener of this song way back 2000, the year when I finished school and stepped out in to the outside world. The cold and chilling, practical and hostile world where every man should learn to survive. Over the years of engineering and MBA, while innumerable lessons have been learnt, I today preach the sermon on the vulnerability of the human mind once again. No, I don’t sit with dreamy eyes on the edge of my bed with a flower in my hand and whispering nervously like a virgin, “she loves me! she loves me not!”. I’m sure and sorry to disappoint you but I did turn out to be smarter at birth and perhaps that virtue stuck on with me through my adolescence and maturity( “ If so, I may rightly proclaim).

Well, coming back to the title, I was just wondering on whether the human mind is fragile and fray enough to succumb to the love of a person to an extent that he has to forget the follies of the person. Can you love a person and yet hate them as well. Good lord, people would probably think of my as one to be stored away in an asylum. Yet, all the same, out of all the so called wisdom that has been emanating from my beard, I presume, this one has taken a lot of my time and analysis.

On one hand we have people to whom you talk about love and they have a picture of hearts falling from the sky and cupids dancing and everything is so idealistic. People are ready to sacrifice their entire past and present for one go at the so called fantasy land, a place where there is something called true love. Pardon my intended sarcasm and mockery of such souls, due to my personal biases, but nonetheless, they dream and hope for the state of perfect contentment. For these individuals, life is like a movie, perhaps notting hill and these people no less than Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, they wish for one, where commitment leads to contentment. Aptly, the title “And they lived Happily ever after” fits perfectly into the picture like the last page of fairy tales we read as children.

But that is perhaps what lot of people dream for and very few achieve. While I don’t believe in any form of arbitrary generalization, yet, in most cases, the stark reality is different. People meet and see the best sides of each other. We see any what we want to see and based on our requirements, aptly create a match between what we want to see and what we see at that time. Later, when there is everything we need in order to make ourselves happy, we realize that despite the commitment, the so called contentment is not there. Why? Simply because there is a mismatch between the perceived and the actual reality. We simply don’t try to see the other side of the person. Every individual has shades of grey, a set of virtues and vices. While we are in love with a person initially, we see only the good things of that person. We are so attuned to the virtues about the person we love is that later when we get into a long term commitment or an institution like marriage, we are not in a position to handle the grim reality that the person you love so much has a different side which you were perhaps unaware of or rater you conveniently turned cold shoulder to.

If I tell you now that the people whom I love the most are the ones I hate most as well at times, how would you react. Accept it, not react to it or simply deny it. But somewhere down the line there is some truth in what I say. We think that the people we love are subjected to unconditional love of specific intensity irrespective of what situation may arise. We exult chants of magical and undying love, where we’d do anything. But when it really comes to the long run, when you are talking about not just day or nights but years or an entire lifetime, there are times that the person you love so much is the one you’d probably despise and loath at times. These are the people on whom you may be angered, or perhaps hate them.

While hate may be a harsh term at times and in certain cases, yet what I’d say is that my liking for people fluctuate daily. One instance I really like a person and another instance I might not. My liking for a person changes. At times, I remembered the quote “The fun is in the chase”. Come to think about it but perhaps the lady love you were crazy about no longer appeals to you. Why do marriages lose charm at times. Why do we have so many discussions on reigniting passions in a marriage that is failing.

Perhaps a slight indication towards what I’m saying and the fact that I’m not abnormal when I say that I get bored of my girl friend. While this is definitely not an acceptance speech of my commitment, disappointing all the young beautiful single ladies, and I still maintain that I'm pretty much single, yet, I’d say that this really happens. Your liking for your girl friend, wife, or family relatives changes and we are perhaps not aware of this ourselves. Happens with me. In my limited interaction with women, my fascination for them ends very soon. My best friend has to incur my wrath at times and at times so do I. There are innumerable things in her that I probably hate and want to change. There are times when simply dislike her for everything and yet somehow, we sustain.

Think of it, the people whom you love are the ones whom you know the most intimately and closely. While there may be some facets that you may love, there may be equal number of things that you may find repulsive or irritating at times. At times, this becomes prolonged which may be lead to severe personality disorders at times. Harsh irritation, violent behavior, undue aggressiveness are all facets that occur and usually unknowingly.

I guess part of human nature, people whom we love most are the people from whom we expect most and at times get angry upon. In fact I’d say, when we talk about long term relationships and institutions, it is not the ability to love a person continuously with same intensity that counts, rather it is the ability to sustain the journey through all the ups and downs that matters. Knowing that your partners may have his days of sunshine and gloom in context of his or her liking for you. Going on despite everything is what really matters.

The Twins....... Coming Soon....
www.priungkushchatterjee.blogspot.com

Emotional Coup

What do I write upon today? Often as I walk everyday in and around my house and doing the daily household chores in the markets and malls nearby, there are various perspectives that run within my mind. But the tough part is identifying them and then penning them down accurately as the moment when they first appear on the large screen, it is usually not the time when I sit down and write. So, eventually what happens is like after watching the premier show and then walking out of the movie hall, I have to constantly keep reminding my self of various facets of the thought I wish to write upon and soon after reaching home, like a critique, I sit down to write and regurgitate that what is left on my mind. Tough, doesn’t it seem so. Well, I’ll let you into the secret for remembering. I try and remember the feeling that is generated as a result of the thought and consequently, when I am writing, I try to invoke the same emotion and feeling to simulate the feelings and the thought.

You see the biggest gift for humans is their emotions and feelings. While some people totally try to keep emotions aside on top of a shelf, some people are too engrossed in their emotions and get so drowned in them that at some later point of time, they take their emotions as a weakness. How do they deal with their weakness? They try to run from them. However, after running for a prolonged period of time, like Forrest Gump, you come to a point of numbness. A point that can’t be characterized, like the empty space. Call it infinity or call it pitch dark. We run and run so hard away from our feelings and emotions and get mixed up in the rat race that eventually feel empty in our lives and have nowhere to go and nothing to do. Total blankness. A return to where we started. Essentially, it turns into another of that clichéd vicious circle. The truth is that most of us at some point of time come to the self realization that while emotions and feeling are something that we avoid as it brings all the unpleasantness and the hurt, yet we need them to survive and feel life. Its funny, all the good time we have in our lives but we don’t understand the value of emotions and feelings. And suddenly one bad incident and we suddenly realize how painful emotions and feelings can be to handle. This is when we start running from them. But in the end, you start looking at life in a different manner. Once you have been through the pain, you realize the true worth of happiness and learn to look for it around and enjoy it.

Avoiding the pain, the ego crisis and running away from the evident trauma. We run so hard and fast and get involved in the mad race I this world, that there is often no time to ponder on such issues. You wouldn’t be surprised when you see in movies that the hero has to immerse himself in work to keep himself away from thinking of the affair that didn’t work or the love of his life that ditched him for another man or the wife who walked away or died, or for the son who didn’t recognize his father. There may be innumerable of those examples and I am most certain that while we sit and talk of them in a casual manner in our dining rooms and coffee shops, branding them as a mere exaggeration of human emotions, irony is that we all do go through some of those typical feelings often in our lives at some point of time. And then we find that the things we were laughing on are actually happening to us. So you run, but eventually when you finally get tired and stop to catch a breath of air, you realize you are so empty and fake, leading a pretentious life in front of the world, but still feeling so naked and raw as you stand in front of the mirror to look at your self. You are no nude painting of Michelangelo, no aesthetics, jus a naked body in front of the mirror, who has no place to hide, just tired, burnt and bruised. Full of contempt, burning with anger and devoid of positive emotions, you look like a zombie, a victim of witchcraft. You need emotions and feelings to feel full of life. I guess at the end of the day life is a big compromise. Some people make that compromise easily and move and some people can’t and take their time. The things that hurt you are things that you either avoid by shutting your eyes like an ostrich or you just decide to remove your ego and try to change your perception on that particular issue.

Irony is that the beauty of feelings and emotions can be realized only when you have gone through the bad side once. While I don’t intend to state that as a law, and I am sure people do realize the essence of emotions and feelings, yet I could safely say that they are more pronounced once you go through the turbulence. Perhaps this is what makes you more sensitive to the other side. Too abstract! Perhaps but then I’m sure this must be the beauty and I am sure you could connect to you own examples rather than mine.

Without taking this a step too further, I'd just say . Emotions that hurt you. Emotions that make you run away and yet emotions that make you want for them all the more. I guess I myself am in mixed emotions now.

valentino memorablia

PS: All characters inthis blog are purely fictional. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is prely coincidental.

Another year passes and so does another valentines day, knocking and the world going down for a day with eyes drooling with love and women as usual waiting on top of their porch and penthouses, waiting to be wooed by the men from Venice aboard their gondola’s. Ah! The exasperated sigh of a lonesome man like me who has perhaps never tasted exotic wine and spent an evening with a fine and wholesome lady of stature, class and looks, just await for the best days of my life in anticipation, looking out through the window on top of the tower. Alas! I don’t even have long hair like Rapunzel, in the bedtime stories, locked on top of the tower by her evil step parents, rescued by a prince. Unfortunately, keeping aside the gender difference of Rapunzel and mine, I await year after year wondering what is so wonderful about this one day in the year when you are supposed to be, not by will or choice but by social obligation, to be in love.

I look through the windows, clearing the mist and looking at the world, drool with love on their eye lashes. The excitement is in the air, like a lightening and a waterfall from a cloud burst that has struck permanently from the sky to the earth and is perennially present till eternity. All seems to be a fantasy land. Call me a pessimist but some how I feel left out of the charade all together. While at times I convince my self that I’m above the rest of the maddening crowd and its better to be single than to mingle like the merry men of Robin-hood, and convince myself that it is a matter of choice by way of which I exist the way I do, yet there are pangs of loneliness and guilt for keeping my self locked in the cellars of loneliness, depriving myself of the worldly pleasures and earthly desires. Some where I do wish perhaps there should have been there some one. It is not self contempt or applying first aid to my self inflicted wounds, rather, it is a mere fantasy that even I can afford to live for an instance, though it might look like self pity and remorse, yet giving me the joy of flying without wings.

As I rest on a rocking chair like grandpa’s do in the library next to the fireplace with their pipe in their mouth and brooding pensively, I go back down the memory lane and recall a small instance of valentines that I try not to forget. A normal day in the life of an insignificant soul like me, lost in the oblivion and just hanging around with a special one whom I particularly wanted to say a lot to but perhaps couldn’t as I had emerged from an accident involving the heart a few months before. They say a broken heart takes a lot of time to heel and this new lady in my life was turning out to be the way of fast recuperation out of the ER. A day when the world is feeling special and yet I didn’t and felt weird if I started feeling that way. Somehow past had made me all the more conscious on this one day. Why? Because everyone in the world knew what this day was supposed to be and so my feeling would have taken as a mere wave of over-emotionalism. I felt so naked and vulnerable, cos somehow I knew the girl I approached already knew what I had in my mind and so I took extra care to be just day way I am.

Returning to this particular day, I spent the entire day with this lady and doing nothing special as the world would ordinarily do. Just making sure to be extra cautious, not doing anything out of the league that might hint her that I had something in my mind. For one, I didn’t want to lose her if she got the wrong idea and definitely not considering the bad phase of my life I was going through after my last break up. This girl was my only friend and perhaps more, but I just didn’t want to risk it.

But then this lady was not ordinary as well. She was really special and as it turned out, all the typical mediocre and routine things we did that day turned out to be all the more special and extraordinary. As the day was approaching an end, we recollected the special times we had in the past few months of our acquaintance and how time always seemed to run short when we had all the things in the world to talk about and yet, when we had the time, time froze in eternity as we simply lazed on the grass in the warn sunlight, basking like newly born cubs, devoid of the world around. We walked all day and then made each other read our diaries for one particular day that we wanted to share. As the day approached to an end, we jus didn’t want to let go of the time and wrote thing to each other, in a mortal attempt for immortality of the instance of time. Finally, the day came to an end and as I walked to say goodbye for the day, we decided to venture in towards the college building. Just to prolong the moment that seemed so golden. A moment when neither of us had to say anything as we had done through out the day. Just a silence between us. The silence of reassurance and a bond that was from the heart and an unbreakable faith. It was so surprising how at times after spending years with a person, you might not know him and how a stranger suddenly become so close to the heart as if you’ve known her all your life.

So as we walked towards the college building, which was empty by now. We decided to take a walk to the first floor, just on the pretext of checking out the library and having a sip of water from the water cooler n the first floor. Mind you, there was a water cooler on each floor, but the one on the first floor was inexplicably special, call it an emotional bonding, specially during after college hours as it gave all the privacy and solace to the couples. So we thought, why not just take a round before we come back and say goodbye for the day. As I climbed the stairs with her onto the first floor, and the sun setting down and the point of time when its little dark but not pitch dark. We walked innocently, holding our hands and just not letting go of each other. A few occasional hugs at the water cooler and a few pecks on the cheeks, before I realized my vulnerability. A few hugs and a drinks of water later, we just didn’t want to let go. A hug that became tighter and longer and fiercer as I tried to pull myself away for an instance, fearing that some college staff or guard might discover us in a compromising position like this. So eventually, I tried being bold and with a tight peck onto the cheek that turned into a wicked cheek bite, I separated and walked with her hand in mine, towards the exit. As I walked, a myriad of emotions engulfed me. Desire, loneliness, not wanting the moment to end and also a fear of coming so close that it might hurt later. All this preoccupied my mind as I walked until I casually started checking out the latches of the lecture halls that I was passing. Just casually until, I found one open. I stopped, took a step behind and pushed the door a bit to find it open. For that instance the naughty me took reign over the normal me, with a wicked smile. I’m sure if I had a camera, I would have resembled the devil himself, with two horns on my head, a long tail and a spear in my hand.

Unquestioningly, I looked at her, who by now was a bit dazed at what I had explored and scared of the consequences and yet desirous of what she wanted a few minutes back. A quick gesture of the hand to ask her to follow, but I could see her mind going through the dilemma of what to do. I walked into the classroom, like an anxious teenage kid and looked out for her, asking her to come in quickly before any one else knew what we were upto. Suddenly my hormonal system seemed to be going into a frenzied chaotic activity, beyond any explanations. And as she walked in, it seemed to be something that we were waiting for. A special moment for both of us alone and cut off from the world. Just the two of us with no society and no qualms. Just a moment of truth. As we walked in and bolted the door, words were an unnecessary tool for the emotionally challenged people. When an action itself could speak millions of words, who needed words. As we walked towards each other, and embraced, time froze till eternity.

No it wasn’t a typical Hollywood flick like situations where there were wilds sparks flying in the air, or like Sharon Stone said in Basic Instinct to Michael Douglas, in the discotheque with a dusky voice “lets get out of here”. It was simple quite moment that belonged to both of us.

A slow embrace and slow dance with the music in our minds and feeling of belongingness. A moment that we didn’t want to lose. As we stood, with my arms around her waist and her hands across my neck, playing with my hair, I realized this was perhaps one moment that I’d probably never want to end. Of course I also realized the height difference between the both of us as I had to stop below to reach her. Nah! That is a an exaggeration and I’m sure she would be furious as she reads this. Well no I didn’t stoop down but yes looking into the difference, I had to put my arms around and raised for an instance onto the air, and then eventually she stood over the slightly lifted slab on the ground, reaching my neck. As I felt her breath on my face and her face on my mine, gently, rubbing her lips and cheeks on my face and forehead, teasing around and I rubbed my slight beard on her shoulder, I could see the exotic look on her face, that made me hold onto her forever and preserve the look for ever. Perhaps it still is ingrained in my mind. Soon we were holding each other tighter, feeling each others body pressed hard against each other, speaking of the insecurity and the loneliness we had been facing for such a long time. A basic need emerged that needed no words of solace. As we looked at each others eyes, the naughty me kept taking control and nibbling here and there till I got a reciprocatory bite on my cheek, as if taking revenge of my past actions. At times my hands wandered here and there but were suitably punished with a pinch or a slap.

It grew darker outside but we didn’t care. Just holding on, caressing and cherishing the moment of togetherness. A few love marks for each other to make ourselves remember of the time when time froze. Seconds transcended onto minutes and eventually to an hour and more, before we heard the loud whistle of the guard outside, which seemed to bring us out of the fantasy void and the delusional trip that we were taking on each others arms. One final kiss and we opened the door to the outside world and as I walked to leave her that night, I knew something had changed. Something that I would never forget. As I walked that night with her out of the room, the world seemed to have changed. For an instance, I was drooling with my hangover. Suddenly nothing else mattered. I realized some thing so basic. I had just had my first valentines day which I would probably never forget. Neither did she. The fact that her hair pin was stuck on my head when we were entwined. Having forgotten it, I walked into the hostel and the mess, with people looking at my unkempt and shoveled hair and giving me giggles and smiles, which I initially took to be a sign of world being in love that day. She on the other hand walked into her hostel, unaware that one of my gifted love marks were right on the left side of her neck, visible to the entire world except her, until she looked at the mirror.

And for one more instance, time froze for ever, even while we were away from each other.

Who Am I? Am I You?

Who am I? I am you

Another of my ironical constructs that I begin with the statement “ isn’t it ironical?”

Isn’t it ironical? You wonder you know who you are and yet you never fail to surprise yourself when you dawn upon the self realization that perhaps, there is a different you, ignored, unwanted and hidden in the closet. So who is you? Is it you, the one you think you know or is it you, the one who is a stranger in the mirror. I’ve often wondered who I am and always felt I am the one I know. But then if that were the case, then I wouldn’t be writing this blog in the first place. It all began a few days back when I was on social networking forum called Orkut, in the process of creating a fake id for myself so that I could browse the profile of a person who I thought I had a massive crush on. While it started innocently, just to look into a profile, where I didn’t want my name to be associated or realized, I stumbled upon the quintessential question of who I was. That is how it all started. I’m sure most of my readers are aware of the social networking portals, yet for the benefit of doubt of those who don’t, any member signing into these sites are required to create a profile for themselves. This was where I started another tirade of useless blasphemical portrayal of my self.

As I began to describe myself out there, I realized I had the power to define myself, the way I wanted to. Ultimately and of course ironically, this is what lead me through the journey into my cave. The cave full of icicles of human aspects, which belonged to me, I treaded on towards the unknown. Onwards stepping carefully, I ventured deeper into the cave, where by walls full of icicles were nothing but projections of myself in my mind. Walking on and on, I went really deep towards the never ending end of the cave. It was cold there. Spine chilling cold, icy wall that looked more like a work of art of the human mind. With the faint light that was coming from the cracks on the ceiling, they seemed to glow like the aurora bolearis that dawned upon the skies of Greenland and the north pole.

So who am I? As I started pondering upon the whole issue, my heart started to thunder against chest, as if in a bid to tear apart and break free. Like the drum beats in the tiger hunt in the old colonial movies, where the British hunter sits on an elephant with a gun and the Indian villagers in large numbers beat the drum and the empty cans. Like an anxious yet nervous girl, going in for her first child, not sure of what the outcome may be at the end of the labor, I sat there, staring into the wall, sweating and thinking “Who am I?” I started tracing the journey of my life from as far as I could remember and walked through the garden of events that came across, from the flowers of achievement to the barren land and thorns of disappointment. I carefully looked in the garden, to try and find something common that would perhaps be the common entity that could perhaps help me define myself.

The dilemma of defining yourself, and that too again. Why? why? why is what you ask and I retort back and say why should I define myself in the first place. I don't know who I am and maybe I do and just don’t want to define myself. Perhaps I’m scared and nervous or I don’t know who I am and that’s why I can’t. I’d agree and I don’t find a reason to admit that I’m scared. I’m not scared of being scared at all. Defining yourself as an individual or a pre-specified set of virtues and vices, qualities, positives and negatives is very frustrating in itself. It’s like the preset in the car stereo. Oh! Today is preset number one and hence you accept the prophecy that came from the lord “Thou shall stay kind, compassionate, humble and down to earth” and then some thing happens and you’re not in a good mood or life takes its toll and Vola!! Press Preset number 2.which states “Thou shall avenge the world for your miseries. It a mean world, thou has to survive by killing thy brother and being street smart. Though have weapons of treachery, deception and lie. Thou are now a sworn knave of the kingdom of hell”. Fuck! It doesn’t happen that way does it. You can’t say you are one person and that is the way you’ll stay. It all changes. And before you realize, you change yourself.

It dawned upon me that perhaps that any attempt to generalize yourself is in itself very constraining and restricting from some one else that you might become eventually.

Defining your self very constraining and benchmarking yourself against the defined parameters that I'd define here now might act against me some time later. I know this sounds confusing but then think about it. Today I say I am aggressive and focused. Tomorrow I might not be the same. I remember, a few years back, I was not who I am. I was under-confident. Today I’m not. I was honest and docile, today I’m different. A few years my emotions were my weakness, today they are my strengths. Once I wanted to be cool, under severe pressure for thinking what people might perceive of me, but today I don’t give a fuck. I’m ignorant and oblivious to my surroundings. I used to hate people who criticized me, now I don’t take it because I’m not bothered. And it’s not all about changes. Yesterday, I used to be scared of admitting I’m in love with someone or that I have a crush on some one and it still is the same way today. So it’s not about just changes. But the point is yes humans react to the environment and respond accordingly. And so I do. I have changed drastically. I fool loads of people. But now I don’t find it incorrect. And why should I? May be my perspective has changed to look at things. May be I have evolved but then that doesn’t make me a different person from who I used to be. It’s the same person. One soul and one individual, but with different shades of human emotions and aspects in grey.

It makes me wonder. Am any lesser than who I used to be or am I any greater than the person whom I might become. You see it’s not a war of more or less but it’s a war within yourself to the point you can handle your perception about yourself at the end of the day. You look at a mirror and see yourself physically but if you look into the mirror of your mind and heart, you’ll see a blurred image till the time the self realizations dawns upon you that you are a versatile actor in the stage of a drama called LIFE. I know it because I play different roles. I can be who you want me to be. The you here is not you as a single person but as an environment where I exist and respond to the turbulent situations. I play different roles. To me its not right or wrong. Its about how I react to the person in front of me. Understanding him, gauging him and is expectations from you and then assimilating it to being the person you project. Now you might be saying that this not right in not projecting yourself according to others. But I’d probably retort and say hey, I accept it that this is the way I am. At times people assume things about me and I derive sadistic pleasure by playing this game. An inner satisfactions of gauging and distorting perception.

Life is too fast and just whizzes past your ears like a Ferrari and yoou just wonder what that was. Oblivious you move on and this the way I see it. Who cares and who gives a damn. Just move on in life, not thinking of what people think of you or what you think of yourself. Just be yourself and go on. Why define. In the end, it doesn’t even matter.

Irony is that life makes people change and there are different perspectives about human character that can't be summed up by defining a person as a set of ingredients to the recipe for perfection. If you do try to live by defining yourself, then you are caught on the web of going against your own benchmark that you set once upon a time. Doing so, you snatch away the ebullience and charisma of human life in totality. So then who is me? I’d probably say I’m me and I’m you. Its like a Hollywood flick. I’m different at times but that’s me. Oblivious to the world around you, you just live without the thought of being someone that you think you should be or whom you might be in the distantly near future.