Preeyan delves into the complexities of relationships, with nuclear families and changing contours, exclusively for Different Truths.
There are times, when I feel I need some love, there are times when I feel I need some care, most of the time I crave for attention and there are times when I want to be reassured that there is someone waiting for me. This is not only a feeling I have, most of you would agree that you go through these feelings, I have expressed. There are a lot of quotes that you may use to define love, there are a lot of quotes you may use to define relationship itself, yet the definitions, though all true never really define what it means to you. When you are asked what relationship / love means for anyone you will never get one unanimous response. This is because, it is a feeling, it is an experience and it is a state of mind. For every one the definitions are different.
Being Indian, we probably understand complexities of relationships more than anywhere else in the world. As we have lived in joint families, specific cultures and religious diversities of the neighbourhood we live in. I pity the new generation of people who are now becoming nuclear families and the complexities of relationships are being restricted to mom, dad, siblings and friends. They don’t see their neighbours or even talk to them. Our children don’t get together with children in the neighbourhood and form formidable ties that last for years. Friendships bloom to love and teenage sweethearts becomes the wife or husband. Failure in love just because we did not have the courage to openly admit our feeling for them. Fight between friends because we realize that we both are in love with one person. The way we overcome such issues, that “adda” where we friends ganged up, made plans for the week and the adventures we had.
Why is it so complicated now, why is it so difficult for all of us to do this anymore? Recently a friend of mine was going through some issues. Though I tried convincing him to speak up he never really opened up. The same person who 18 years ago would not be without saying anything to me. Its astonishing how the times have changed. I am sure that if we did not have this revolution in communication I may not have had to try to persuade someone so much. Even I have tried keeping things to myself and realized that it is as easy as it can get. What bothers me is that we don’t really talk the way we used to with friends anymore. Maybe it is because we have lost the need for the physical presence in our emotional bonding with anyone. Those days the physical presence is the reason why our bonds are still strong. I read old letters we used to write to friends or get from friends and realize that it was words filled with so much emotion and the feeling of warmth was always there through the entire read. There may have been a thousand words in the letter but each one meant something extremely good. Now a days we see of experience none of this. Everything has become instant. What’s up has permanently become WhatsApp, my personal album has become Instagram, and my friends are so many on Facebook that I don’t recognise who is true to the friendship we offer. To test that I upload a picture and wait to see the number of likes I get for that picture. With all this technology and devices that is making a social being a lazy, virtually social being, who forgets to believe that he is actually alone in person and what he sees are all just images on a device which will all just go into suspended animation when we die.
We are missing out on the things that we used to do to ensure that we are still emotional and sensitive. We need to bring those practices back. We need to start living in the real world. With the boom in the technology front virtuality has become so real that I will not be surprised if a person sits in his 10×10 room during his vacation and get the experience of actually going on a vacation to an exotic location. We are here in the breakthrough of making life so self-centric that every contact physical or emotional will start to feel like a mighty interference. Lets all start to make a change. Let’s move towards those days where we did everything together. Our strength is when we are in large numbers than when we try to be isolated. Let’s teach our children the value of relationship, let them also fall in love, let them also feel how we felt when we were kids. I pray that we one day all of us realize what I say and work towards making a better life for everyone. I pray that, that day is not far away and soon we break free from ourselves and mingle with people.
Relationships are hard to keep and the toughest is keeping it together. The emotional connect come what may, is never there with modern communication methods and we need to look back at meeting and talking, staying close and providing emotional support. Lets probably start by talking to our neighbor. Shame on us we don’t even know what their names are. Let’s start with us and let’s move forward, the world will be a better place with this move itself.
Cheers!
©Preeyan Abraham
Photos from the Internet
#Relationship #Emotions #Love #Life #Family #FamilyStructure #Complexrelationships #Support #DifferentTruths
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