was just thinking about relationships in this day & age and here's my article published in the daily "Central Chronicle" on June 21,2008.
2years old article, but seems quite valid even today!!
Bonds Today !
Manisha Gupta
Relationships are not attractive and artificially scented crisp paper flowers that you can make within seconds and put up in your drawing room. They are soft, tender, inherently perfumed and beautiful real flowers that you nurture in the garden of your life. It takes ages to build them into genuine long lasting ones.
Relationships are neither about just wishing, calling & sending cards on Father’s day, Valentine’s day, grandparents day, this day that day. Nor are friendships just about sending, emailing or sms-ing readymade, cut-paste, “impressive” messages on friendship day or world friendship week etc. Nor are they just about exchanging friendship-bands or about sharing good food, good wine and good times. They’re much much more.
Bonds are not about just calling up your mother from the U.S or the U.K on the second Sunday of every May to wish her happy Mother’s day. Nor are they about landing in India once every few years to either solemnize or legalize as per Indian traditions, your already long live-in relationships, just to get all relatives to accept you and not debar you from their mental and social spaces. Neither is it about using everybody you know for your selfish motives, and never ever to someone else’s advantage or even happiness.
With alarmingly increasing incidents of people killing their own family or relatives, comes forth the fact that relationships & family bonds are now already on a downhill running into the sea of terrible trouble that awaits Indian society. The once strong mountain our traditional norms is probably now weakened with repeated attempts of various negative forces within ourselves, with our cultural values having been washed down in the incessantly pouring rain of aping every other culture.
The west is on its way to learning everything from yoga to spirituality to vegetarianism, becoming more sensitive, while we Indians don’t look back even once to what our ancient glorious past traditions taught us. We don’t value our value systems anymore and so family systems and bonding have undergone a tremendous change in our society. We no more want to spend time & emotions in building long lasting deep relationships. We are living in an era of quick-fixes, fast foods and instant relief & gratifications. We decide to love or marry someone within no time, get married and then within no time file for divorce or quicker still, kill the spouse and marry another person who’d entered into our life. Such quick decision making powers and quicker disposal of lover or friend or relative sure makes us very “competent” to live in this fast paced world.
We are no more forgiving or sacrificing but would do anything for giving our selfish gains a boost and wouldn’t mind sacrificing even the lives of our nearest & dearest ones for attaining any selfish motive. We’ve become very self-centered and forgotten the tenet of keeping oneself last. We begin and end at the “self”.
That’s what relationships and bonds have come to!
This is a very deep and brutally honest article. I completely agree with the need to be reflective, deep and thoughtful atleast in the matter of emotions and relationships. I personally feel that a person normally looks at 4-5 kinds of security:
ReplyDeletePhysical, social, health, financial and last but not the least emotional. People have become so self centered and shallow that in trying to look at the other needs they completely forget the investment of time and energy required in nurturing and building on the emotional front.
Your article thus clearly brings out the crucial need for honesty, trust and long term orientation to this crucial aspect.
Very thoughtful and thought provoking. Look forward to some more of these series.
The article is clearly a true mirror of today’s times. This article has reminded me of a poem I read in school which emphasized on the need to stop and introspect. Well this definitely seems to be the need of the hour. Everyone has only one human life so we have to make up for all mistakes we have committed in this life itself. For this one has to regularly introspect one's actions and thoughts no matter how busy one is.
ReplyDeletebonds are not of remembering of them once in a while.they are of creating a long lasting relationship and killing our own selfish and self centered motives.
ReplyDelete