A cliche like Valentine’s Day set me thinking on what love is....the different ways in which it manifests itself and what each of those could potentially mean. There are relationships, diverse, close and not so close and each means something,
Here are some loves that mean the world to me:
The love for my parents - This is the one love that has seen more upheavals than any other love in my life. I loved them totally as a kid when they were my role models and idols for everything I wanted to do and everything I wanted to be. Come teen years and I almost disliked them - hated the pressures they put on me for studying, conformance to appropriate societal behaviours and the list of do’s and dont’s that would sometimes choke me. And yet, as I left my teens, I found a friend and confidant in both my parents. They are both as different as chalk and cheese, but in both I found answers to my questions and support for whatever I wanted to achieve. They may have been products of a more conservative time, but made sure that their daughters would receive the best education and be self sufficient. Today, as they get on in years, my relationship with them is changing again..I can’t handle my parents getting old - it shifts the ground beneath my feet. And yet, the joy and love they bring in my childrens’ lives is incredible and I love them all the more for it.
The love for my children - Till I did not become a parent and go through the journey (young as yet) of parenthood I did not realise the utter selflessless and selfishness of this love. I want the best for my kids and make sure I provide everything needed to make them successful and happy. But it is tinged with selfishness - that I want them to do well, have the right tools in life that will help them make wise decisions in love, career and life. Their success and happiness will , to me , demonstrate if as a parent I have been successful...and no other role in life matters.
The love for my spouse - one of the most difficult to define. How do you define love for someone you spend your life with? Anything I could say would fall short! Mine was an arranged match and I met Praneet after meeting maybe some 20-30 guys! And yet the first time I saw Praneet I knew this was the guy I wanted to spend my life with. He was everything I wanted in a life partner - super intelligent, super smart and successful and with an amazing sense of humour. When he hugged me, it was not irrational passion I felt, but a sense of coming home. Of being in the place where I wanted to be and where I was meant to be. And our years together have been like peeling off petals of a multilayered flower - each peel reveals a different aspect of my husband and his love for me. It manifests itself in his not interfering in the person I am, in accepting all my friends and my baggage, in being an amazing father to our kids, in being absolutely loving to my parents and sibling , in being the provider who has never made us lack for anything and also in his constant criticism of my work that irritates me enough to do better. what can I say to a love like that? Except to say that I want to die before he does coz he has spoilt me so rotten!
The love for my siblings- I come from a hysteria laden family....no gathering and no ceremony is ever complete without massive fights, show downs and meltdowns - and yet if you were to look at us an hour later, you would never think we were so close to killing each other.
That defines my relationship with my siblings too.. my sister - the closest pal I have and my brother, 16 years younger who fulfills his role as my brother completely. They are the ones I implicitly trust with all my secrets and fears and I know they are the only ones (apart from my parents and Praneet) who forgive me all my tantrums and bad behaviour. And Rano has given me the other loves of my life - my bro in law - who I think loves me even more than she does and her lovely boys whose ‘Maasi’ kills me!
The love for my friends - Gosh - here I am truly blessed. I have friends of both sexes who I am terribly close to and who cover every aspect of my life - the jealous friend, the mean one, the 12 o clock call one, the dirty chinese one, the tequila shot one, the perfect mom type ,the sleazy one, the avid book reader and the one who knows exactly the right thing to say. A lot of my friends are not in the same town either. Some of these friends I meet every day , every week or month and some that I have not met for years. But it matters not - coz I know we pick up the threads from where we left and understand each other perfectly. They complete me in many ways and are always, always there for me...
The young love - That was some love - the obsessive need to be with someone and to have one’s life filled with a deep desire to create a world that was exclusively ours. The happiness, the pain, the anguish stand clearly in my mind , but not the want any more. But it was cute - the times when just looking at someone made my day and a smile would throw my heart in a tizzy; fixing times to chat on the phone, engaging in elaborate subterfuges to throw parents off guard (ofcourse my Mom was always too smart and I always got caught - so it just became easier to tell her the truth!). It was good to be young, to feel that passion and love and to move on from it. And to create enough memories of it!
With each of these people , my love for them is unique and special...As Paulo Coelho says - love is always new. whether we love once, twice or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand new situation.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
GHPS Reunion
For the past three months, every time I received a friend request from someone from GHPS, I would refer to the memorabilia that had been uploaded by some good soul. I would try and look for the person in that and if I had atleast one memory, I would accept the facebook request. If not, I chose to do nothing.
The GHPS reunion, was for me , an opportunity to meet two of my closest pals I had totally lost touch with - for two decades and more.Meeting them was lovely, but the reunion turned out to be much more than that and I have come back home - richer for the experience.
Learnings
Youth is wasted on the very young! We were so stupid, OK, I was so stupid when I was in school. There was no awareness that this was the last time I would be among a huge peer group - no matter how forced! And that this peer group was so varied and diverse. After I left school, there was no effort, even desire to remain connected. In college I made new friends, pursued new interests and then moved to do my MBA and later work. While I remained connected with most of my MBA mates, my school mates did not cross my mind even once. And meeting this gang gave me a twinge of regret - at my own brashness.
People do not change - it took one conversation to remember stuff about the people I met at the re-union. And no matter what life experiences people have, the intrinsic person changes not. The naughty ones were the same after 25 years, as were the ones who merely stood and watched everyone. Even the sleazy ones had not lost their sleaze!
Memories - All said and done, after 25 years, each of us had very few memories about each other. But collectively, those memories were substantial. And I bet most of us walked away with plenty more memories than we had walked into the room with. I am beginning to realise that most of our memories are still there somewhere, needing only a nudge to awaken.
A return to innocence - Nothing beats the thrill for me of meeting people who remember me as Preeti Bakshi. 16 years of being Preeti Singh makes me very happy, but Preeti Bakshi is reminiscent of the time when I was young,super confident, carefree and terribly brash. I miss that me sometimes.
I left the reunion with a sense of gratitude. That I had been fortunate enough to be able to attend the reunion and meet with batchmates long forgotten. That as a batch we had done fairly well at our chosen professions and businesses. That most of us were healthy - even if the metabolic rates had slowed down!That most of us were alive !
And with some regret- I missed all my friends who did not make it to the reunion- their absence made the reunion a tad incomplete for me.
But I do hope that most of us will be around for the next milestone as well!
The GHPS reunion, was for me , an opportunity to meet two of my closest pals I had totally lost touch with - for two decades and more.Meeting them was lovely, but the reunion turned out to be much more than that and I have come back home - richer for the experience.
Learnings
Youth is wasted on the very young! We were so stupid, OK, I was so stupid when I was in school. There was no awareness that this was the last time I would be among a huge peer group - no matter how forced! And that this peer group was so varied and diverse. After I left school, there was no effort, even desire to remain connected. In college I made new friends, pursued new interests and then moved to do my MBA and later work. While I remained connected with most of my MBA mates, my school mates did not cross my mind even once. And meeting this gang gave me a twinge of regret - at my own brashness.
People do not change - it took one conversation to remember stuff about the people I met at the re-union. And no matter what life experiences people have, the intrinsic person changes not. The naughty ones were the same after 25 years, as were the ones who merely stood and watched everyone. Even the sleazy ones had not lost their sleaze!
Memories - All said and done, after 25 years, each of us had very few memories about each other. But collectively, those memories were substantial. And I bet most of us walked away with plenty more memories than we had walked into the room with. I am beginning to realise that most of our memories are still there somewhere, needing only a nudge to awaken.
A return to innocence - Nothing beats the thrill for me of meeting people who remember me as Preeti Bakshi. 16 years of being Preeti Singh makes me very happy, but Preeti Bakshi is reminiscent of the time when I was young,super confident, carefree and terribly brash. I miss that me sometimes.
I left the reunion with a sense of gratitude. That I had been fortunate enough to be able to attend the reunion and meet with batchmates long forgotten. That as a batch we had done fairly well at our chosen professions and businesses. That most of us were healthy - even if the metabolic rates had slowed down!That most of us were alive !
And with some regret- I missed all my friends who did not make it to the reunion- their absence made the reunion a tad incomplete for me.
But I do hope that most of us will be around for the next milestone as well!
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