An Overdose of Love

In this fast-paced world, where everything is at the touch of a button, greetings and wishes have become monotonous and impersonal. The same Diwali or Christmas message is forwarded to a million people and your Facebook wall is full of birthday wishes from people you hardly know. But come Valentine's Day, Mother's Day or Father's Day, and suddenly, there is an overdose of love...

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So it’s that day again! The day when everyone suddenly realizes that they need to show their love and affection to their near and dear ones. Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day, the 14^th of February, the day of love. The day when flower vendors make a killing and sales of Archies cards and gifts shoot up by almost 50%.

You leave your house and the town is painted red – literally! Red roses, girls dressed in red, women in red saris, the list is never-ending! Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for romanticism. In fact, I’m a die-hard romantic! I live on sappy romantic movies with their cheesy dialogues and clichéd happily-ever-after endings.

What I don’t get, and what irks me to no end, is why we need a specific day to show our love and gratitude to those special people. Wishing everyone, getting all romantic and mushy, and going all out and spending your last penny to get a gift for that someone only on that day, just doesn’t make sense.

And it isn’t limited to Valentine’s Day alone. It extends to days like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Thanksgiving Day etc. In the USA, tables in restaurants are booked almost 3 months in advance for these special days. You will see dutiful daughters with their fathers or doting sons with their mothers sharing a heart-to-heart talk and acting like they haven’t met all year.

Wait a minute… Of course they haven’t…

They don’t bother to call or keep in touch during the course of the year, but come Mother’s or Father’s Day and suddenly your parents are super special, even if they have been languishing in one of those old age homes throughout the year.

Your boyfriend and girlfriend is the centre of your world, even if the two of you just can’t get along the whole year. Friendship Day is a day to exchange expensive friendship bands and gifts, even if you bitch about the very same friend the next day. Women’s Day is a day to show how special, yet marginalized, women actually are. The many rapes and dowry deaths every day are immaterial.

Why do you need a day to show love? Why do you need a date on a calendar to fill your heart with warmth for those who have sacrificed so much for you? The mother who denied herself a new sari so that you could buy that toy you wanted. The father who worked overtime to make sure that your school and college fees could be paid on time. The lover who forgave those malicious personal remarks you made in a bout of anger.

However, man is a social animal and it is such events and celebrations that make life worth living. Enjoy Valentine’s Day, dress up, go out, and make sure you have a great time. Buy that little pendent you want for your mother, or that black tie you just knew you had to buy your father. There is nothing wrong in that. Contradicting myself am I? Well not really. By all means celebrate, but make sure you don’t go overboard. Make sure that the same love and affection is present every day. Say ‘I Love You’, smile, hug and do something to make that person know that his/her world truly revolves around you. Not just on one day of the year, but on every day of every month of every year.

After all, I believe that it’s not money, but love, that makes the world go round!

Hope

Hope. The opposite of despair. An emotion that is probably most taken for granted, and yet one that is the basis of our very survival. Whether you call it Hoffnung in German, esperanza in Spanish, or aasha in Hindi, it is still that feeling of deep and instinctual anticipation that we all feel, at every stage of our lives...
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Hope – a four letter word that, according to me, sustains human beings on this planet. Hope is what makes the unbearable bearable, and what illuminates the blackest of nights.

Hope is the tiny flicker of light that a man in a dark cave gropes for, it is the faint heart-beat that the mother of a stillborn child craves for, and it is even the red blot that the child who has failed by one mark is desperate to avoid seeing.

Human beings cling onto hope even when everything else seems lost. Hope is a way of comfort for many. It bolsters their strength by sheltering them in a cocoon of blissful limbo. It prevents them from breaking down and losing their sanity.

Whether you call it craving, longing, yearning or desire – ultimately, it is all hope. And it is this hope that helps us to live each day resiliently and courageously.

A person who has loved and lost, lives with the hope that the new day will bring with it new love; a person paralysed waist-down yearns for the morrow that will allow her to walk, even if it is with support.

Can you imagine a life devoid of hope? What if the man in the dark, airless cave loses hope? What if he is convinced that he is going to die in darkness?

In that case, he will not even try to venture towards freedom, and will definitely die. Whereas hope, even temporary, may at least inspire him to reach out towards the goal – his freedom.

But hope has its imperfections too. How long can you continue hoping? How long can you have faith in that little voice deep inside you that says “Everything will be alright”? The feeling of dread, emptiness and trepidation is bound to come back to haunt you sooner or later.

Think about a woman whose husband has disappeared at sea. How long can she wait for him? How long can she continue to hope that he will come back? One fateful day, she will have to give up and accept that he really is gone, and get on with her life.

And when this tiny thread of hope snaps and the flame of faith is extinguished, it is then that you are most vulnerable.

It seems as if the plank of wood that you were desperately holding onto, to stay alive and afloat, has broken into two, dragging you deeper and deeper into the murky waters of stark reality.

No one expresses it more beautifully and poignantly than Rabindranath Tagore in his story, ‘The Postmaster’ –

            “O poor, unthinking human heart! Error will not go away; logic and reason are slow to penetrate. We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe in the weightiest proofs against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end it escapes, ripping our veins and draining our heart’s blood; until regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again."

Losing Someone You Love

Love. One of the most beautiful complexities of life for sure! That initial feeling of euphoria, the blissful courtship phase, the mature laid-back phase, the (maybe) taking-for-granted phase and the final break-up phase, easily the hardest... 

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The scars that you can’t see are the hardest to heal…

- Anonymous

Have you ever lost someone you love - be it in a relationship, in an accident, or in death?

Losing someone – a dear friend to a misunderstanding, or a loved one in a relationship – is as painful as losing someone to death; the only difference being that you cannot recall the dead, so you ultimately resign yourself to the inevitable. But in a break-up or misunderstanding between friends, you always cling to the false hope that everything will be as rosy as before.

Memories of the happy times in the relationship keep haunting your every waking hour. Familiar places and landmarks bring tears to your eyes, as you try, day after day, to lead a normal life.

But the pain that engulfs your entire being is something you can only experience first hand. Even the finest counsellor cannot prepare you for the feeling of complete and utter hopelessness that flows through the blood and in your veins.

You keep blaming yourself for the failed relationship, and keep wishing that everything was as beautiful as earlier.

Happy memories bring more sadness than happiness, more tears than laughter. Every little word of love that was professed from your partner or friend’s lips now seems like a poison that spreads to all your organs, slowly torturing you and ultimately sapping out the light from your life.

The days seem long, and the nights cruel. You cry yourself to sleep, wishing you could confide in the very person who broke your heart, to show him / her that you still care, that you still need them. Knowing that they are far way, not knowing how you feel, probably not even thinking about you, hurts more than the parting ever did.

Your days are a haze of lights, and a rush of voices. You walk around isolated – nursing your broken, wounded heart, dying a hundred deaths, and wishing that the pain would stop.

And then you look at the world like a President does through the bullet-proof glass window of his limousine – sheltering yourself from the hurt and the pain - yet longing to go out, be one with the world and not remain shackled to the four walls of confinement.

Kind, sympathetic words only make you more vulnerable. Sayings like “It is for the best” bring more anger than comfort, and words like “Be brave”, though true, sound too philosophical. Bouts of anger are often followed by buckets of tears.

And just when you think that you will be alright, you see two lovers walking hand-in-hand, or two friends laughing, joking and making merry. And the pain bursts forth like before, weakening your new-found resolve, shattering your peace of mind and draining you of the little happiness you had found in that short span of time.

But like they say, there is always a rainbow after the rains. And Time is a great healer. Though Time cannot completely heal the scars, it can make them considerably lighter.

Involving yourself in your daily routine, listening to healing music, and confiding in a friend or grown-up makes the journey to the other side easier and less painful.

If you can learn from your past failures without any bitterness or spite for the one who broke your heart, then it is worth all that you have gone through. For then, you have grown into a more tolerant, mature, stronger and wiser person.

And finally the day will arrive when you will be able to look back at the memories as a learning experience, and smile instead of cry. You will be able to thank God for giving you all those wonderful moments to share with that ‘special someone’.

And that is the day when you have learnt to let go. You have freed yourself and the other from the fetters of sorrow and confinement. You feel free, liberated and whole.

It is moments and memories like these which make life the beautiful journey that it truly is. For, unless you experience the rain, how can you enjoy the sunshine?