Skip to main content

Relationships


“I am your handiwork made flesh.  You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born... I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love; your destructive, selfish, wanton love.  Your love looks just like hatred.... I was honest and you turned me into your lie.  This is not me.  This is not me.  This is you.”

Salman Rushdie’s character, Boonyi, in Shalimar the Clown, spits out the above dialogue to her husband Max Ophuls.  Relationships have the tremendous power to wreak such havoc on people.  Relationships can be devastating. 

Relationships can be beautiful too.  It depends on the people involved, their attitudes and motives.

Relationships are quite like chemical reactions.  The elements can enter into strong and beautiful bonds creating admirably different compounds.  But unlike in chemical compounds, the individuals should be able to retain their own unique personalities in human relationships.  In a good relationship, the individuals grow and help each other grow. 

The primary ingredient in a sound relationship is mutual understanding and acceptance of the otherness of the other.  When I understand that the other person is such and such and I am also able to accept those traits, I enter into a beautiful relationship – provided the other person reciprocates with similar understanding and acceptance. 

That’s not easy, however.  Most people are not much different from Rushdie’s Max Ophuls. In varying degrees. They like to impose themselves on the other.  And go on to create lies out of honesty.  Re-create the other in one’s own image or after one’s own ideal about the spouse or friend.  Since people are not insensate clay to be moulded by a craftsman or craftswoman, such attempts at re-creating are doomed to end in disaster.  The other individual ends up as a living lie, an  impostor, a fragmented personality, a victim, unless she/he ends the relationship and walks away to rediscover her-/himself.

I have had quite a few friends who insisted on reshaping me because they thought that my soul stood in terrible need of redemption.  Some thought that I had to be tamed if not reformed altogether.  Some had ulterior motives like breaking me in order to please the boss who would award him a promotion as a reward. 

I have never understood why I attracted so many such ‘friends’ and may never.  So much so that I have embraced virtual solitude.  But I know that relationships have their beauty in human life.  Relationships can enrich.  I have had at least a couple of such experiences too.  Not everything has been dark.  Some light is good.  Otherwise I wouldn’t be here as a writer – I mean, blogger.  But I do wish I had met different people on the way.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 156: #Relationship

  
Labels:

Comments

  1. Durga Prasad DashFebruary 10, 2017 at 10:25 PM

    Solitude gives an opportunity to build a beautiful relationship.. often neglected... It is with oneself.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sunaina sharmaFebruary 11, 2017 at 4:10 AM

    I agree wholly with Durga's point - often to be appreciated, we tend to become what we are not. Other times, due to criticism, we become what we are not. We have multiple selves in front of other people. Sometimes, we are deluded in our own eyes too. Solitude lets us reach our inner selves.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jyotirmoy SarkarFebruary 11, 2017 at 9:18 AM

    Nicely written and good to know about your experience...it helps always.

    ReplyDelete
  4. MeenalSonalFebruary 12, 2017 at 8:12 AM

    Acceptance is very important in relationship, good to know that you were always on positive side of it :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 12, 2017 at 9:47 AM

      I was a slow learner in this. But most people around me usually seemed eager to teach others 😀

      Delete
  5. Alok singhalFebruary 13, 2017 at 12:52 AM

    Everything has its ups and downs...even relationships, as you rightly pointed out. However, never suffer too much in the wrong hands.

    Life would be meaningless if it goes just in one direction!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 13, 2017 at 6:53 AM

      Sometimes one is rendered impotent by the overwhelming might of one's'benefactors'!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The...
62 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 3

Street leading to St Francis Church, Fort Kochi There were Christians in Kerala long before the Brahmins, who came to be known as Namboothiris, landed in the state from North India some time after 6 th century CE. Tradition has it that Thomas, disciple of Jesus, brought Christianity to Kerala in the first century. That is quite possible, given the trade relationships that Kerala had with the Roman Empire in those days. Pliny the Elder, Roman author, chastised in his encyclopaedic work, Natural History (published around 77 CE), the Romans’ greed for pepper from India. He was displeased with his country spending “no less than fifty million sesterces” on a commodity which had no value other than its “certain pungency.” Did Thomas sail on one of the many ships that came to Kerala to purchase “pungency”? Possible.   Even if Thomas did not come, the advent of Christianity in Kerala precedes the arrival of the Namboothiris. The Persians established trade links with Kerala in 4 ...
10 comments
Read more