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

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

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
44 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more