Every day, Google Photos gives us a notification to check out our earlier pictures, “memories”. They are tricky memories. Some put a smile on our faces, and some just make our hearts heavier.
There were those innocent days when we used to laugh freely and easily with a devil-may-care attitude. Don’t we miss the days when all we could think about was watching Shaktimaan, Timba Roocha, Alif Laila, Alladin, and stuff? Most of our daydreams were going to the mulberry tree and shaking the tree so that the mulberries would fall, and we could collect and cherish them. Yes, we did have issues that we did not understand. Childhood trauma was there with us, walking hand in hand with us. But let’s just say we did not ask ourselves the purpose of our lives. As Batman (Ben Affleck) says in the movie Flash “Our painful past has made us who we are today”. We just thought of our mothers as our protectors and our punishers; she knows everything and is always right. Life was easier when we thought babies were just God’s gift to moms.
Now everything is so complicated: people, relations, environment, climate, politics, and work. We must work harder — not to make our lives easier but to help others. We are, of course, always miserable. We begin to wish it was easier, but it never is. There is so much negativity around that we even have to think before we speak to our loved ones. We could speak anything earlier without thinking, now we do not do anything without overthinking.
We want to hurt ourselves. If there is no reason, we will find some other way to hurt ourselves and put the blame on someone else. We can be at ease. Maybe it is a little less hurtful when we know it is not us but someone else’s fault that our life turned out like this. We like chaos so much that we embrace it, invite problems into our lives, and try to find refuge in it. We try to damage everything we have purposefully.
Well, I am not denying that there is no love. It is out there, now more than ever. We now realise how much that love means, and we realise that it may someday become extinct, like our sparrows. We look up to small things that make us happy. We are sometimes so drained of love that we try to find it anywhere we can. So, we do appreciate relations now, but something we fail to do is compromise.
What exactly is happiness? Vijay Varma said something very interesting on the Chalchitra Talks channel: “Happiness leads to numbness”. That is true, as when we are low, we feel so many feelings at once, but happiness is just being happy. Sometimes it also leads to laziness. Happiness can never be equivalent to content or satisfaction.
In our childhood, maybe there was not as much love as there was fun. We loved spending time with our cousins or friends so much that we compromised. We fought, and we made up again, just to fight again and be together again. We used to be sad to be apart from each other. Our parents had to take us home forcefully. Now it is the opposite, we have responsibilities. Now it’s us who decide to be apart.
Relations have become complicated, or it was always like that. As Pluto, the dog in Dil Dhadakne Do, says, “We do not have the gift of language, humans have, but they still do not understand each other”. The irony of it is so deep. What is the use of language and communication skills when there is no way we can express how much we care about another person without having so much overthinking, insecurity, ego, etc. in our minds?
