Spring is in the air, so is the Lakme India Fashion Week, the dailies cover it daily, the page 3 ready themselves to be heard and seen, fashionistas preen, new designers look for their place in the sun, Now its not only Mumbai that feels like a Fashion Capital, Delhi is part of the furore too. But the heat is on, fahrenheight rising, and Mumbai is bludgeoning under the weight of launches, art shows, charity events, brunches, all marking the social calendar, and its only just April.
But I got to leave the city for a brief sojourn, lucky me! A flight out to a sleepy little town, where cotton is spun and the yarn made into yardage that is sent all over the world. Driving down, from Coimbatore(the closest airport), I could feel the calm envelope me as my driver drove me in complete silence, zipping through the countryside, taking me closer to the little hamlet I have always called home.
Salem-in Tamil Nadu, used to be a- one horse town, a haven for Sindhis who were looking to make their fortune-money lending. But of course, now with the generations wanting more than the ordinary, life has changed and brought with it more than its share of pleasure and pain. From spending time with aging parents, to catching up on sleep, to preparing my mind to absorb more that life was promising to offer, I braced myself as I heard the stories that baffled me.
Who ever said a small town, has no excitement, everything is almost the same, except how one looked at it. As I look at my life, and the speed I live it in, I feel that people in small towns do it so well, I mean- balancing the quantity with the quality. They make almost the same money as people in big cities do; spend their lives as constructively, have sound family values, watch the same TV shows (thanks to Dish TV) and the movies in their multiplexes (thanks to world premieres), shop in miniature malls.
Ah! But I still prefer my frenzied life in the big city and if I had a choice to visit an even busier city-it would be New York. Maybe, it is still the need for more- that drives me, to be able to live in the big city, to be able to watch newer movies, experience theatre, music, art shows, and watch my children grow experiencing the same. Wonderful life-difficult choices.
So all of this does make me kind of addicted to my life in the big city. Our lives are pretty much controlled by our experiences, as we partake of the good life. How many of us are attached to our fancy cell phones,( checking to see if we have missed a call), chatting or blogging online, continuously buying and selling stocks, attending our so called social functions, serial dating, compelled to being out on a Saturday night, watching our favorite shows on TV, the list is endless.
I definitely plead guilty. I have begun to desire instant gratification. I want everything faster, from my food, to easy money- to faster internet excess. But what we do not realize is as we get used to this so called good life, we forget the difference between enjoying something and craving it.
Back to the city and I hear from common friends that somebody I know is close to divorce. The silence is deafening. The pain I feel for people going through this hurdle is undefinable. I share a common belief with Carol Matthau-‘I don’t think marriages break up because of what you do to each other. They break up because of what you must become in order to stay in them.’ Marriages are definitely built on varying degrees of dependence and addiction.
And there’s nothing lonelier than being the lesser partner in a loveless merger. Since we all work out our Karma through our choices, it is better to shut the door to unhappiness, as that is the crucial step that one must take before opening the next door to joy.
Most times, women are known to view themselves through the prism of their love relationships, mortgaging their souls for mere moments of happiness. The truth is- we must at some point become courageous enough to turn away and form exclusive and inclusive relationships with ourselves. ‘To love one self is the beginning of a lifelong romance’-Oscar Wilde.
Movies that really got me thinking this quarter were-‘Painted Veil’ directed by Joseph Conran (novel by Somerset Maugham). A love story set in the 1920’s, depicting a relationship between an upper-class girl and a doctor, of a marriage that went wrong for all the right reasons, and how it survived the winds of time, in a different country in a different time zone, and the lessons that were learnt through the traumatic journey. ‘Sometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people’.
The other movie that took my breath away was funnily enough again, one that was adapted from a novel –The Namesake by Mira Nair. Set in America, it showed immigrant Indians, and how they coped in a strange land. Intrigued by the movie, (I loved Tabu in it and got slightly offended when my friend called her ordinary, and I stressed –you mean ordinarily beautiful) I ventured out and got myself the book.
I found Jhumpa Lahiri to be one of the finer writers of our time (I am definitely going to read everything she has ever written) and felt that her book spun gold out of the straw of ordinary lives-Wow! There I said it!
Trudging down to Prithvi theatre has always been a pleasant experience and that Sunday I hit pay dirt with Makhrand Deshpande’s play. I enjoyed it to the extent that it stirred my emotions to a largish extent, but then I have always been partial to this frizzy haired man’s acting prowess. Theatre is definitely here to stay.
To conclude can I ask how many of us know the acronym for SWANS? – Well! It simply means ‘strong women achievers no spouse’ which author Christine Wheelan explains in her new book that today, women with less education and lower earning potential women, are more likely to marry than women with a college education.
But I do believe that each of us wants to connect more closely with the people in our lives, we want to know that we belong and are loved and we want to make others feel the same way too. The desire to make beautiful, meaningful moments and things is an undeniable part of who we are.
To live a life artfully one has to pay attention to the thousand little everyday gestures and there’s no end to the ways in which we can share what’s in our hearts. Very simply we each make our mark on the world, through the choices we make and the actions we take.
It’s a funny thing about life. If you refuse to settle for anything less than the best, that’s what it will give you – W. Somerset Maugham
Previously published in the Sindhian
