This is probably going to be the most brutally honest thing
I have ever written so far. I think I need to brace myself a bit and let the
truth be itself, let the patterns weave themselves out; and ironically I want
to try do that through looking at myself and people I have had the fortune to
be part of my life. As I’m hitting away the keys, an old and exquisite love
song in Malayalam (my mother tongue) is playing in the background. Called ‘Eran
Megham’ there is this line among many others that never stops chiming in my
head that roughly translates into this: ‘The hornbill of my heart, waiting and
yearning for rain fell in love with a rainbow’.
I found the idea of there being someone who matches you much
more so than others fairly absurd when I was growing up. It wasn’t without
reason either. There was this guy in my bus who used to talk very rough and got
in fights often, he would address everyone like they were his servants. It was
much to my dismay that I found out we were going to go to the same class.
However after two years, we were good friends and I discovered that at heart he
was a good person. Given enough time and proximity, I always found that you
could get along with most people, even connect with them barring a very few. So
much for conventional wisdom!
However I found the other side of conventional wisdom as I
grew up. As my sister accuses, the spectrum of girls whom I fell in love with
or dated were like different continents in who they were and what they dreamed
to be. I found out that most ordinary people carried this image with them, the
image of the person whom they would end up with even if they had torn down and
stomped on the idea of ‘the one’ and let the ashes fly in the wind. This tin
god would creep up at most unlikely times like when you miss a phone call or
when you lean in for a goodnight kiss. It would say ‘this is not what you
wanted’. Sometimes you find out you have your own tin-god/tin-goddess hidden
somewhere too.
So I wanted to know why and where do these set of tin
Olympians come from? Why are they so immortal? Like all people who like
abstraction, I came upon this idea that a very few things really matter but
like all the critics of the abstraction fans, I have no idea how useful that
is.
One of the reasons that could catch everything in its net
was fear. Even though we don’t know why, almost all of us have this impulse to
prove that we’re good in what we do, what we believe in and that we’re right,
well most of the time. If someone comes and pokes this with a stick, we
retaliate with something much stronger than a stick. Then it seems entirely
plausible that the set of ideas, beliefs, impulses and emotions that
essentially defines you might be a prized possession that you would defend
dearly. There lies our problem. When we aren’t that sure of what we are made
of, another set of beliefs, emotions and ideas that live and breathe with us
might seem a little threatening, especially when the other set gets as much say
as yours in making decisions, small and big. This fear that finally we would be
wrong or the other set would be more right than we are or that even if we are
right, we wouldn’t be able to hold our ground sometimes drives us to do things
that we really don’t want to.
The yang of fear is mutual respect. When you’re threatened
you can’t respect the other person’s mosaic of emotions and believes as you
respect your own. You can’t see them as an individual at an equal footing with
you. You can’t treat them with respect and dignity which all of us deserves as
human beings. Maybe we have forgotten what it is like since dignity and respect
and few of the endangered ideas in our society. Sometimes you’re so afraid of
your voice drowning that you don’t really hear what the other person is telling
you. It becomes hard to accept that even when someone is wrong they deserve to
be heard and talked to. Even harder to respect their choices and identities as
you do your own.
Like the old song says in all its wisdom, sometimes we fall
in love with rainbows even though our dreams were of the rain. Maybe when you
strip down all your fears and carefully pull down theirs, when you decide to be
not afraid, rainbows won’t seem too bad.
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