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_UnPrEdictAbLe_

With the excuse of not having anything else to write about, today I’ve decided to talk about – _UnPrEdictAbLe_. Although there is no deep meaning in this word – just a simple English word written in jumbled case.

Let’s begin with confessions first. Who coined this name and why? It all began in college days, when we used to play multi-player network games. Generally, people don’t use their own name in such games – but an alias – something which they think is cool and stylish. Example aliases – _skp, P@in Killer, _UnPrEdictAbLe_, oBeLiX.

Contrary to the name, I’m always very predictable – be it the computer games or real life. Then why do I use this name? Perhaps I want to prove myself cool and different, which almost “everyone” does. Yes – I won’t deny – it is one of the reasons.

Our whole life is centered around faith and more often than not, things work out as we expect them to. What? You disagree? Think again. Imagine the day you were late for the last bus to office – only to miss the most important meeting of that month. Well, standing in front of your boss, while he is screaming on top of his voice, you’d feel the entire universe is conspiring against you.

However, how many of your faiths were actually shaken that day? The sun rose, oxygen content of air remained normal, temperature of your city remained hospitable, social atmosphere was peaceful, your alarm clock rang, your cellphone alarm rang, city buses plied normally, traffic situation was smooth, … and so on. You wasted (let’s suppose) most of the time searching for door keys – which were “unexpectedly” sitting under the sofa – isn’t it such a setback to your faith in the world?

I live in an unpredictable world where a small thing – like a door key – can have huge ramifications on the course of events. That is why I don’t believe in promises. I can’t promise that I’ll be there for you; I’ll live up to your expectations; I’ll save you from all problems; I’ll be the perfect employee; I’ll never hurt you.

The only thing I can always be certain about is my inner self. I can promise that I’ll always have the best intentions to fulfill the promises you want me to make. However, the outcome of any event isn’t just dependent on my intentions or actions. THE OUTCOME is a mixture of various external factors which I cannot control, and so I’m not in a position to promise on behalf of all those other factors.

That is why I call myself _UnPrEdictAbLe_.

Same moon

Long distance relationships – they’re fun and hard at the same time. This isn’t a long philosophical post about them, so relax :-) . I just thought of something, wanted to share with you all.

“Wherever you are, we’re under the same sky looking at the same moon” – well, not really. The distance of Hyderabad from moon is perhaps slightly different from that of Bangalore.

Its not the same moon – perhaps a moon after a really small fraction of time – not the SAME moon, duh!

PS: Lovers across India-USA, you guys are doing just fine! ;-)

Chronologically elongated

Time has slowed down today, if not halted completely. It feels as if I am Spider-man, seeing the world in slow motion.time I spend hours doing something only to realize that its been a few minutes. I sleep near morning, still manage to wake up on time and don’t feel sleepy. I finish my work before working hours are over, and the night just doesn’t come so soon whatever I do.

I have no idea whats happening to me. It feels like I am in love, the only problem though is that there is no one but me.

Am I going to meet someone new soon?

Social networks

For whom am I writing this post? Who are the readers? This post has been re-drafted five times, and only the people mentioned before are to blame. This is my personal space, my personal diary, why should I write what they want to read?Facebook

Explosion of social networking sites have done something similar. Facebook sends updates to all my friends of each and every click I perform. Many other sites, including Yahoo! Connection Updates are following the same thing. All this is no doubt increasing the amount of time people spend on these sites – people sit and read what their friends are doing, people read about the girl they’ve a crush upon, and whom she talks to, people sit and mock how stupid some of their classmates or room-mates are behaving, and so on.

These social networks don’t aim to bring people closer. There is no formula to do so. All they want is more and more people registering for their service and using it. The more number of people use them, the more advertisements they can show, and the more money they can make.

I fear saying hello to my dear friend on her ‘wall’ or ‘scrapbook’, because it sends a notification to the remotest contacts, that I’ve sent her a message, a scrap or even a poke! I can’t imagine how awkward it’d get if one of those contacts was my dad or mom or little sister. I’ve a couple of hundred contacts in my friend-list on each social networking site, but still I can count the total friends I have, on fingers of my right hand. My phone book is full of numbers, but I can’t figure out even one number to call when am lonely.

We’re living in a world of cyber interaction, and its only ironic that we love the theme of our new facebook, but – the rising sun, the sea shore, the midnight moon – all these are the same old for us. “Did you checkout the new Yahoo! Homepage?” is more commonly heard than “Isn’t the rising sun so very beautiful?“. By the way, check out the new Yahoo! homepage, its really cool.

The platform of chatting gives us immense ease of interaction. We can speak our heart out without any fear, as we remain mostly anonymous. We can act stupid, reveal our darkest secrets, or just talk and have fun, who cares? We fall in love with our chat friend (platonic love), we want to see him/her everyday. Whom do we really love actually? Its just a sleek looking contact icon, or perhaps her way of typing sentences, or his witty jokes! Whatever happens, you’re not a part of their lives offline – never can be.

Everyone of us goes and meets their net friends once in a while. Its fun too, but if you look closer, its awkward. If not awkward, its a really short lived, pleasant but formal meeting. In your head, you want to run away, and sit in front of Yahoo! Messenger, and talk to that icon – in text mode. This in-person thing, the voice, the interaction, the body language, the looks – its just too much to handle from someone who was just an icon before.

I might be sounding cynical about internet relations, but there is a lot of truth hidden in this. It might not all be very logical, I mean nobody made a rule that two internet friends can’t gel well in person too. It happens sometimes, but such cases can be safely ignored as round-off errors. One more thing that people might argue is, there are friends who had to move away due to a job or studies, what stand do I take in such cases?

Well, whatever it is, the bottomline is, real friends are really really really hard to find. It takes a lifetime to find more than two-three, that too if you’re lucky. This explosion of social networks, flood of interaction, truck-load of friends – is very unnatural. Its not real, its all a world of illusion. Its in their best interests to keep the illusion going, so that people keep using these sites, and keep feeling that they’ve a 1000 friends, and still counting.

One of my favorite quotes would suffice the closing.

Its not a miracle to make a 100 friends, the real miracle is to make 1 friend that’ll be there when 100 are against you.

Love story

LoveDoors creaking, wind blowing, sounds of ghosts – all these thoughts have gripped Anjali as she is sitting at the corner of her dark bedroom, gripping the head of her husband Rahul, which is kept on her lap. She is scared in this horrifying state, with no one to come to her rescue. Even her husband’s company isn’t enough.

Three years ago, Anjali fell in love with Rahul, a software engineer. And as it happens generally, they got married and settled together in Mumbai. Everything was like a dream come true for them. Every morning was full of surprises, smiles and love. So were the nights and most of the daytime. She was living so many moments and making so many memories, that its hard to hold them without spilling. But when your life is on the peak, why would you care to remember sweet old memories when every moment is a memory.

Today, there is nothing left but those memories. Its not that their love is lost or they quarrel a lot. Actually, this is the time when they love each other the most. Still some issues remain. She hasn’t heard his voice since an year now. And it has been that long since he said something to her in any other form.

When they got engaged, they used to talk all day all night and beyond it. People say how much can you talk to a person, and about what. But they proved everyone wrong. Whatever came to her heart, she used to pour out on him. And he used to guide her well, protecting her from the world, coming to her rescue whenever she needed support and so on. He was the one whom she used to run to for anything and everything.

She keeps his head on her lap and keeps looking at him. Sometimes she smiles at him, kisses him. And sometimes, suddenly she’d start crying, as if pleading for something. Eventually, they’d both be in tears, helplessly lonely.

Rahul had gone away for some meeting for a week, and both of them were longing to meet. He had a flight on Sunday morning, but Anjali couldn’t wait that long. She kept on asking him to make it earlier. Finally, he gave up and took a Saturday evening flight. The flight got a little delayed due to rains. Rahul reached Mumbai at 2 am. Anjali was worried all night, waiting for him to call up.

Her half awake scared state was only broken by a phone ring in the morning. They told her that Rahul’s body was found in his car, which had smashed into a tree at 2:30 am. Her heart sank. She thought she had lost him. But fate didn’t have something that easy for her in store.

A month later, doctors told Anjali that Rahul’s spine was completely crushed in the accident. He can still hear her and see her. But neither can he speak or do anything else below his neck. Since that day to now, every night she sleeps crying with him, thinking of all the old memories, trying to recollect his voice, his touch, his love.

Love

I Love YouThe other day I was discussing ‘what is love’. First thing I did was ‘define:love’ on Google (Ok, well even Yahoo! Search is good, but I wish it had this ‘define’ feature). It gave various definitions ranging from ‘affection’ to ‘sexual intercourse’. And then I looked up Wikipedia. It described all the types of relationships like father-son, brother-sister, husband-wife, mother-child and their bonding.

requirements for love

So, what is love? Do we need two living beings for love? I love Indore, though a city can be attributed to a living creature, in this case where is the second living being? Then again, you could say bikes love some xx engine oil. Can a bike love? Or are we just misusing the word here?

Love is affection, attachment, sense of belonging, attraction (both general and sexual) and so on. So is love a superset of all these different emotions/feelings/situations? Can we define a ‘degree of love’? Why do people say I don’t love him/her THAT much? And if the weaker relations are just ‘infatuations’ or ‘simulations of love’, what is the threshold above which a relation becomes real love?

finding out whom we love

A dear friend told me, she loves everyone! She says, every human being she meets, she loves him/her. She reasons that it doesn’t have to do anything with sexuality or attraction in that sense. Its more about loving the human being within. I doubt her claims. Can someone love everyone? Yes, definitely there are good people, worth appreciating, but do we LOVE their goodness? We appreciate that they are good human beings, or for that matter, we appreciate the innocence and beauty of animals sometimes. But do we love them?

I don’t want that there is a bomb blast in Bangalore which kills many people. Does it mean I love half the population of Bangalore? I barely know them to love them. We all feel that we’re attached to all Indians (or if we think globally, we’re attached to all humans), but do we love them?

criterion for loving

First off, it is too difficult to find out how many of the 6 billion plus people we actually love. So lets try to put some criterion on loving.

  1. We should know about the existence of the object we love. (Do we love god?)
  2. We should have felt that person once (including but not limited to seeing, hearing, online communication, reading his/her book, hearing their music) (We all have communicated with god, through his creation, this wonderful symphony of nature that is around us.)
  3. There should be some characteristics of the other person that we like in our own way (and they might not necessarily be characteristics that are liked by everyone)

I know that the 6 billion people in this world exist. I know animals and plants exist. So ‘everyone’ fits in criterion ONE.

I’ve read about, talked to a wide variety of people or known their ways of life through television and internet. Lets say with my knowledge set, I cover around 2 billion people.

Everyone is unique, everyone has something different about them. And if you pay attention, you can find something about everyone that you like. But, unfortunately I haven’t being paying attention to each and everyone of the 2 million people in question.

my story

I only pay attention to the ‘currently active’ people in my life. My attention span is a sliding window, when I was in school, I had a different set of friends, and now I have a different set of colleagues. And I seldom try to catch up with old friends (except a very special 3-4).

So at a point of time, I care about a set of 10 people among friends and 20 people among family members. And my affection towards others fades as their memory fades. Does that mean that my love towards anyone is just their presence in front of me all the time?

Then again, there are certain people you seldom talk to, but still whenever you talk to them, you have a deep bonding with them. Even though you haven’t talked since 2 years, you still feel the same when you talk next.

If all people in the ‘active set’ (around 30 people) were to suddenly disappear, my life would get an unbearable shock. I fear losing the active set. But when someone slips out of the active set gradually, though sometimes it pains a little, but my life still goes on.

some instances of love

Seems we’ve drifted a lot from the topic, but seems all these don’t define love. Maybe because love cannot be calculated or understood. It can only be felt.

When you are with someone who is not very well accepted by people, and it would degrade your reputation to be with him, you fear about what you are doing. But when in a certain moment, you feel that seeing him smile, making him happy will give you such fulfilling satisfaction that nothing else matters, I think in that moment you are in love with that person or thing.

At certain times, you feel it doesn’t matter that the other person is happy or not, whether you are rude to him or not. What matters is that you both exist, and talk sometimes. And the distance between you is filled with some cosmic fluid that keeps you attached wherever you are. You are never one of their best friends, but in your heart you know that no one could care more about you than him. Its rare though, have you experienced it?

conclusion

Love is a mutual state shared between two or more objects(living or non-living, real or virtual) that have experienced each others’ existence in any possible manner at least once. The parameters of this shared state can be fully understood only by the objects in question and no one else. No words, no music or any form of communication is sufficient to explain to a third party the nature of the mutual shared state. In this mutual shared state, none of the object(s) involved have any control over the state, rather the state itself drives the actions of the two objects.

Hope it made some sense :-)

Category: Blogging, Love, Moods, Thoughts  Tags:  3 Comments