The chemistry of love

When I first met M, I was in college. She happened to become my closest friend in due course of time. She had a huge crush on a guy in her neighbourhood. She told me about all the dreams she wanted to fulfil with this guy. I sometimes felt that she is in love with the guy though she never declared it in exact words. One day, after class when we went to canteen to have a bite, she confessed her feelings and also described me a very grand preparation for proposing him. She was nervous and full of anticipation. Sometimes she was talking too much and sometimes fell silent. I tried to soothe her mental agony or excitement whichever way the readers might put it. I do not know if I was of any help. Since I am a person who thrives on romance, i really got enormously excited about the whole matter. Next day in college, I waited for her impatiently. She did not come for the first class, making me almost crazy in anticipation. I was not able to concentrate. The next class , she entered, looked at me as if trying to suppress her smile. She took the seat just next to me and in hushed tones half filled with shyness and half with triumph, told me that the guy had accepted her proposal. Her eyes were glittering with emotion. After the class we went to a coffee shop for elaborate discussions on the matter. She described the whole incident with such animation, that I truly envied her happiness. I kept thinking that M has got the true love of her life. Or was it true love? Or is true love and eternity of relationships a figment of our imagination. After one year she told me in the bus stop, while waiting for a bus to our college, that she is head over heals in love with a classmate of ours and wanted to break off with the neighbourhood guy.  I was extremely perplexed. Before this I thought that she had received the love of the person whom she desired so much, then what went wrong? Why did she fall out of love? I asked her the reasons for her sudden change in feelings. She told me in a guilty voice that she was not in love with him anymore, but she didn't know of any particular reason. She told me that she never realised that she was drifting away from him. When exactly she started feeling for our classmate was absolutely unknown to her as if some magic spell was put on her. Her eyes looked so helpless. Previously I used to feel that people who claim that they fell in love with somebody else while still being in a relationship were weak people with no strength of character. I believed them to be devoid of the ability to feel love in its true essence and lacking in devotion and commitment. But looking at her face I could not see anything of that sort. She was very much in love with our classmate, had the same glitter of emotion in her eyes for the guy promising all notions of commitment and devotion. She was ashamed of feeling that way, for another guy but her feeling itself had no impurity. She never wanted to betray anybody, but she had fallen in love even without taking her own conscious permission. 

My theory of eternal love was shaken for the first time. Now when I look back after so many years and think with all other similar incidents acting as proof of my new theory, I feel wiser and less naive. I feel that we are like molecules which are in constant brownian motion and like molecules we keep bumping into different kinds of people. Sometimes we collide with people who catch our interest and we fall in love just like molecules undergo chemical reactions. How stable the newly formed compound is foretells the future reactions these constituent molecules might undergo. Similarly when two people form a relationship, the time for which they will be together depends on the depth of the relationship. Also in both cases the circumstances have a huge role to play. Whom will you meet next or how the same person you had loved so much will change with time or what unavoidable circumstances might pull two people apart are some of the reasons why love although still being an eternal feeling is non-existent for eternity. 

First impressions

It is a difficult thing to get to know about a person you have just met. The acquaintance may not have been long enough to form a judgement. But still people tend to form a certain idea about the person’s character. They form a mental picture of whatever they feel on the very first meeting with the total stranger. There are many writers who have discussed these finer details of the human behaviour. In fact there are novels based on these issues, like the very much loved Pride and Prejudice. It is an all time classic where Jane Austen has beautifully dissected and analysed human  perception on first encounters through a very simple romantic drama. The portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are representations of people of different levels of society who have a different set of ideals while judging other people. Ms Austen has done a great job bringing out the differences in the character of people built by society and not only by the inherent nature of the particular person. Due to the differences in the ideals, both Elizabeth and Darcy make up their minds on their first meeting as to how the other person is. The judgement is more on the basis of assumed facts which are dictated by society to reach a particular conclusion about a person. They have absolutely no basis when the ground realities are considered. This is where the first impressions falter and as we know society helps us survive many vices but also clouds our ability to form opinions free of prejudice. Also another novel which has a similar viewpoint is North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Here Ms Gaskell has portrayed very finely the dilemma which people in academics or the intellectual strata have about the business class. Margaret, the protagonist had such severe ideas bout Mr. Thornton’s sophistication, just because he was a factory owner. When I was reading the book, sometimes I felt for the poor labour class with which Margaret used to deeply sympathise and think Mr. Thornton to be responsible for every sorrow these people felt.  She felt Mr. Thornton to be crude, incapable of finer thoughts and have a materialistic viewpoint about everything. When he made his feelings known to her, she could only give him credit for viewing love as a possession and being incapable of sentiments identifiable as love. All this was an influence of the way we are told to think about people who understand money. All the people who are part of the intellectual strata associate people with hard business intellect with coarseness. However the people who have earned a lot of money through business also have the derogatory feeling for the academics and researchers. They think that they simply do not have the expertise to make money and so will remain poor. They also most often have the tendency to judge people by their materialistic possessions and designate social status based on monetary evaluation. But the question is should we as individuals judge another individual on a parameter so inconstant? I feel we should make an effort to be free of the dogmas of society when making a new acquaintance. The reason being that loosing a future friend based on the preset ideas of society is not a wise thing to do. What do you think friends? And who knows where love awaits..

realising love: Difference in our times

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realising love: My first post

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Difference in our times

Today I saw a girl and a boy in front of Garuda mall, Bangalore, which is one of the popular places to hang-out in the city. The girl was busy posing for photographs. The poor fellow supposed to be the boyfriend didn’t know what else to do to keep his pretty girlfriend happy, clicked on. The girl with the sweetest smile which was not present a second before when she first reached to see her boyfriend was standing as gracefully possible for the clicks. After the photography session again the same bored expression clouded her face. Those pictures must have been for her profile in the numerous social networking sites like facebook. It is quite fascinating to see that people now get more pleasure in social networking than their real life boyfriends.

While observing them my thoughts kept going back to the time when I was in high school. The guy I had a huge crush on sat just two rows ahead of mine. I couldn’t help but staring at him while the teacher kept on giving lectures. Sometimes, I was standing outside the classroom for not paying attention in class. Still I could never give up on the urge to keep watching him. It was not that he was extra-ordinarily handsome, but he had something about him which could attract me. My friends could never understand why I liked him so much. I would dream about him all day long when he was not in class. In my mind I would make up circumstances when I would collide with him or would fall in his arms as so commonly shown in bollywood movies. All these fantasies made me so happy at that moment and also a little sad when I realized the impossibility of these happening in real life. I had always wanted to tell him how much I loved him, though it was difficult to believe how I fell so hopelessly in love with him without even knowing him. I kept imagining the things I would do if we ended up being couples. I would talk to him all day long and then I would kiss him passionately as shown in movies. I keep referring to movies because I had no experience of my own or of other people around me. The only source of such knowledge was movies. When I watched this couple fortunate enough to have each other, I thought how they could be so engrossed in thinking about pleasing the world.