Broken relationships come back again and again to haunt me. I keep trying to build fragile relationships; fragile and sure to be broken soon.
All relationships need nurturing, especially when they first start to come out of the bud. Both people involved have to take good care, like you take care of an infant. Cater to all the whims and fancies, do silly things to humour it, lavish all kinds of gestures and emotions, and pamper it so that it slowly grows into a strong and independent entity. Then you can let it take care of itself. Sometimes I wish for a relationship to develop out of a seed that is too dry. I bury it in rich soil, water it carefully, and pray and hope. Eventually a little shoot emerges, frail and unsure. In my joy at seeing it, I have forgotten that it cannot survive with my efforts alone. The other person too has to look after it. Right now I am blind to everything except for that budding bond. I continue with all my labours, often changing my very nature in the trial. All the while it gets harder and harder to keep it alive and healthy. It takes more and more of my energy and slowly drains all my emotional strength. But I plod blindly on. I fool myself into believing that very soon the other person will realise the true worth of this relationship and start with their part of the job. It never happens.
And one day, I see. I see that I had been living an illusion. There was no budding relationship. I was watering and nurturing barren sand. I was just imagining that the other person would soon be part of my life. They were nowhere near my world. But strangely it does not matter any more. I suddenly don’t care.
Some relationships are more demanding than others. Some people are more demanding than others. I guess my demands were too much for the other person to meet. So it did not work.
I think I’ll take up gardening. It does not involve two people.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
I broke a family tradition!
I wasn't well the past few days. Each time I go to the doctor, he tries out new experiments on me but never quite succeeds in finishing me off. Every new medicine brings out new aches and pains in my tummy and generally I am much worse off than I was before I went to him. Perhaps he is trying out all the latest drugs on me to test their potency level.
While I was on yet another course of medication, something struck me which I did not think of before. The names of the drugs. I wonder who comes up with the oddball names for all the thousands and... no, millions and millions of drugs in the world. I remember reading somewhere that the name of a drug should contain at least one syllable of the main component, or something like that. So you have Crocin, Metacin, Anacin and so on. Logically it means "ci" is the syllable they used from paracetamol. From here on, each new brand brought out has more and more bizarre names to make sure they don't sound too similar to competing brands. Some of the names are so ridiculous, it scares me to ask for them at the chemist. Tagon (tag on what?), Daflon (I almost asked for teflon), Stemetil and Deletus (is that Latin for delete? Delete as in 'die'?). There is mighty little room for creativity here, what with a hundred rules set down for nomenclature. I wonder if they hire people especially for inventing new names. If they do, I wonder how much longer those inventors stay normal before this out-of-the-box creativity scars them for life.
Anyway, let me get out of this deep search for meaning in life and make an important announcement. I have broken a family tradition. Most of my family is not very happy, indeed many are quite bugged with me. We Belmannu Raos have a few traits that seem to be almost a tradition. For example, many of us stand with our feet non-parallel, heels closer than toes. A very mild version of Charlie Chaplin. Contact lenses are another thing we all have. So if any guest of ours forgets their lens solution and case, chances are they need not go back home to fetch them. Also many of us, including girls have just a suggestion of widow's peak.
And the most prominent of our khaandaani traits is high blood sugar. High blood sugar is almost expected of all men and most women of my family (father's side I mean) after they have reached middle age. Now I fell ill and my blood test showed my sugar levels to be below normal. When my father saw the report, he did not even bother with the sugar reading. I too very nearly flipped over the page when something caught my eye. "LOW". Huh? What does that mean? Slowly I realised that I had gone and done something that no Belmannu Rao has ever done before. I am not saying that I was proud of this, but it was a first-of-its-kind phenomenon nevertheless.
I am going to frame the report for future generations to gaze at and stand in awe of the mysterious ancestor who dived to the depths instead of climbing to the heights.
While I was on yet another course of medication, something struck me which I did not think of before. The names of the drugs. I wonder who comes up with the oddball names for all the thousands and... no, millions and millions of drugs in the world. I remember reading somewhere that the name of a drug should contain at least one syllable of the main component, or something like that. So you have Crocin, Metacin, Anacin and so on. Logically it means "ci" is the syllable they used from paracetamol. From here on, each new brand brought out has more and more bizarre names to make sure they don't sound too similar to competing brands. Some of the names are so ridiculous, it scares me to ask for them at the chemist. Tagon (tag on what?), Daflon (I almost asked for teflon), Stemetil and Deletus (is that Latin for delete? Delete as in 'die'?). There is mighty little room for creativity here, what with a hundred rules set down for nomenclature. I wonder if they hire people especially for inventing new names. If they do, I wonder how much longer those inventors stay normal before this out-of-the-box creativity scars them for life.
Anyway, let me get out of this deep search for meaning in life and make an important announcement. I have broken a family tradition. Most of my family is not very happy, indeed many are quite bugged with me. We Belmannu Raos have a few traits that seem to be almost a tradition. For example, many of us stand with our feet non-parallel, heels closer than toes. A very mild version of Charlie Chaplin. Contact lenses are another thing we all have. So if any guest of ours forgets their lens solution and case, chances are they need not go back home to fetch them. Also many of us, including girls have just a suggestion of widow's peak.
And the most prominent of our khaandaani traits is high blood sugar. High blood sugar is almost expected of all men and most women of my family (father's side I mean) after they have reached middle age. Now I fell ill and my blood test showed my sugar levels to be below normal. When my father saw the report, he did not even bother with the sugar reading. I too very nearly flipped over the page when something caught my eye. "LOW". Huh? What does that mean? Slowly I realised that I had gone and done something that no Belmannu Rao has ever done before. I am not saying that I was proud of this, but it was a first-of-its-kind phenomenon nevertheless.
I am going to frame the report for future generations to gaze at and stand in awe of the mysterious ancestor who dived to the depths instead of climbing to the heights.
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