Emosanal Attyachar

Well the other day I had the great misfortune of watching the reality show “emosanal attyachar”. Since flipping through the TV channels has become my latest hobby, I guess there is no scope of complaining much either. Coming back to the show, this is a very cheap unworthy version of Steven Sodenberg’s “sex, lies and videotape”, minus the sex. If you suspect your partner is cheating on you, contact the TV crew and they will prove it. They will record the suspect’s infidelity in a videotape and show it to the devastated boyfriend/girlfriend. All this will be aired on TV, plus the mayhem that follows. The viewers being sadistic and bored in their own frustrating lives actually enjoy the public humiliation of the “cheater” and the agony of the “cheated”. “Achha hua, the bastard/bitch deserves it” is all they can say. Its sad because they are the same people who champion “love” and search for “love” their whole lives. But when the bubble of this over-rated “feeling” bursts, they simply condemn it. Hypocrites!..We all are.

So I decided to do a small pathology on “love”. This is something I observed in my “quest” to find out “where love went wrong”. I maybe wrong or absolutely right! Just try to see it my way before throwing the hate bombs at me.

Why do people fall in love? I think its mainly to kill their loneliness. Strike one! reason to fall in love. Nobody wants to be alone. Everybody wants somebody. And in the haste to fill their “empty cup”, they get into relationships. No wonder “cheating” becomes a second nature. After all, the very root of love is poisoned. You don’t love your woman, you are simply using her not to be lonely, and neither she loves you. You both suffer from the same disease of “loneliness” and reduce each other into things to escape this inner hell (Remember Britney singing “My loneliness is killing me..”. Well it really did kill her.) No doubt first few months you both will be on seventh heaven, but when the “commitment” monster comes along, the relationship will get ugly. Love never grows out of fear. Fear begets only more fear. Suddenly they can’t stand each other and eventually will start looking for greener, better pasture. Or lead a more frustrating life by getting married and covering their unhappiness with the façade of “love”.

What about “made for each other” concept? That’s Strike two! reason to fall in love. Nobody is made for anyone. This is only in our heads. For example, Jack carries the image of his mother as the model woman, and Jill thinks her dad as the model man. So Jack and Jill goes round the hill to fetch “the one”. Unfortunately, they took the imprints of their respective models in their minds. When Jack met Jill, his brain cried out loud “she is the one! She is the one!” even Jill’s brain shouts ”he is your soulmate”. So, the brains analyzed and then finalized that the blueprints match the model. This is not a lame hypothesis but a Freudian fact. You fall in love with your head. Don’t believe me? Read this . Now Jack and Jill “falls in love” and gets married. And then something went wrong. One fine morning, Jack wakes up to realize Jill no longer fits the ideal he carries in his head. Now the trouble is multiplied ‘coz even Jill feels “he is not the man”. No wonder, Jack and Jill came tumbling down with an ugly divorce and broken hearts. 90% of the marriages die because of this and the rest 10% live miserably with the hope that “someday they will change”. But in rare occasions few marriages are successful. Wanna know whose? The one between a sadist and a masochist. One loves to torture and the other loves to be tortured; together they make the happiest couple. Both are psychopaths and they love to live a life of torture. Otherwise every marriage will fail, if imprints were the reason why the couple came together in the first place.

So what is love? Love is belongingness. Strike three! reason to fall in love. Love is like a ladder - from sex to super consciousness. At the lowest rung, love is nothing but, power politics. It’s like sugar-coated politics that exists between husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. Poets, musicians, movies talk about great love but its all about a desire how to exploit the other. No wonder possessiveness and jealousy is an intrinsic part of love. Your over protectiveness is not that you love that person more, its simply your insecurity that you will lose that person. Nobody wants to lose their favorite thing. That’s why love is 99% of bitterness and only 1 % of sugar that you coat on top. We often come across the term “object of affection”. Humans, by nature, always need to posses that one thing they love. Ironically, these days people are falling more in love with their pets, their cars, clothes etc. After all, to be in love with human is utter hell. It’s a continuous conflict -nagging, always at each other’s throat. And when this kind of love turns into marriage, its definitely World War III. So please meditate over a few of Murphy’s sutras before you do the“I do”:

1. 1. Its good to be married occasionally.

2. 2. Marriage is a three-ringed circus: engagement ring, wedding ring and suffer-ring.

3. 3. Marriage may make the world go round, but so does a punch in the nose.

4. 4.Saving a marriage from divorce: do not show up at your wedding.

5. 5.A woman is God’s second mistake -man is the first, obviously- the two wrongs together don’t make a right.

6. 6.A woman is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of the “bakra”.(ok, I made that up but it still makes sense ;))

So go home today and take a good look at your partner(or their picture) and ask why you “love” him/her. Is it because you have a hidden/subconscious agenda? Or is it because you don’t really need a reason to be in love with them? And this is the Ugly truth, my friend. Don’t you think life is too short to live a Beautiful lie??

In my defense, I would say “only fools rush in”, fall in love and commit the same mistakes all over again. But you know why? ‘Coz those freaking moments of being in “love”, will be some of the best moments in your life-even if it happened at the very last moment of your life. So stay foolish, stay happy.

“NAKED SEARCH” AT HEATHROW…. Umm, not cool!

Flying to US via Heathrow? Welcome to the latest 3D- full body scanners! Talk about virtually being stripped at the price of air travel. The scanner apparently see through the clothes but has no effect if anything is hidden inside the body. What happened to the good ole X-ray machines?? Won’t it be hilarious, looking at a smiling skeleton air–kissing or waving at the camera? Could definitely spread some much- needed laugh. But I guess the security won’t be complaining much either with the new body scanners.

Yeah, I know I am ranting like a village rustic about downside of technology (upside for anyone?). Anyways, if I get much-delayed visa (I know, they did it again!), I will be flying the British Airways back to Philly. And that’s why the horror of the scanner! Its not like I am hiding something, but I am very uncomfortable climbing a conveyor belt and lying like luggage. It’slike living my own perpetual nightmare. If only that Nigerian shit head didn’t carry out the orders of that equally dumb organization. Which brings forth another uncomfortable procedure. Passengers with Muslim names such as Khan can be detained and questioned. Not only this will be humiliating for them, but also create an ill feeling between communities. This gets me to think why I was double-checked before boarding my flight back to India? Was it because I am brown or because I don’t have a Christian name? Funny, because the newspapers are currently buzzing with headlines having an American-Pakistani name, David Coleman Hadley. Now I am thinking hard, but laughing even harder.

I totally understand that people in the West are currently paranoid with the terrorist threats. But do you think it is justified that someone in the American embassy decides that I shouldn’t attend school on time? Of course, you can’t question the authority about this recurring nightmare. Just because they may have some “doubts” about my profile, not only will I miss an entire term of coursework, but also four months of research. I mean you go for your visa interview with all the required documents (Mind you, everything is legitimate), you won’t be asked any question, but simply given a green paper saying the visa is delayed due to “administrative processing”. You then answer a series of questions online and wait for 4-5 weeks, depending on the workload of the embassy.This is not a one-time thing, it happened twice! So my friends have come up with some of the stupidest and funniest theories behind my “delayed-visa” mystery.

Anyways, my biggest and only console is that I get to spend some with my family, but how long? The happiness changes to boredom after few weeks. No work and all play makes T-F-L a lousy writer(as you can see it!).