“Love the life you live, and live the life you love.”
Bob Marley
It’s hard to believe that another month has just flown by and its time again to count our blessings on this 4th Thursday of the Month. Before I list what I’m grateful for this month, I’d like to thank Vidya and Corinne for this wonderful exercise that makes us count our blessings. After 30 days of grumbling about one thing or the other, it is always nice to step back and take a look at what makes our lives worth living.
After a weekend that consisted mainly of cleaning up ( it never ends does it?) I was actually looking forward to the #MondayMusings prompt and was disappointed in not finding any. However, I decided to tell a story or rather a series of stories taking a cue from Nicholas Sparks’ quote on Corinne’s post about every love story starting with a story.
Everyone has a story about how they fell in love . Or how they met and married.
When I was growing up, I was amazed to find that there were several people of my grandparents’ generation who actually fell in love and got married like Uncle X who was going to meet The Girl Who Was Proposed to him and landed up falling in love with her younger sister instead. Looking at Uncle X and grim looking Aunty Y, who’d have believed they’d fallen in love? But he did, and I’m sure she did too because even though she called him Aho , she’d slap our hands playfully and giggle ( after 60 years of marriage) and tell us not to tease her when we’d ask her what his name was. I was frankly quite shocked that granny’s friend could fall in love and get married but apparently they did.
Then what about the story of Aunty P and Uncle Q who actually met at their elder siblings’ wedding? Both younger siblings were enlisted by their respective wedding parties to carry messages and notes between the two families and lo and behold, after the wedding festivities died down and the families returned to their respective homes, the two little ones continued writing till a few months later they announced their own wedding!
Fast forward to more contemporary times when couples took love into their own hands. Like the time P, the aggressive marketing guru who went stomping down to the HR Office and saw a pretty young thing sitting on old Mrs. Sequeira’s desk. Boom ! went his heart and instead of yelling at her for goofing up on his Insurance Claim or whatever it was he had come to do, he actually went up to her and said “I’m going to marry you before the year is out.” And true to his word, before the year was over, he was down on bended knee and putting a ring on her finger.
S who is a very serious looking fellow from a small, hick Indian town amazed me by his story – He had to go down to the QA department for some urgent product specs. Being the shy guy he was, he didn’t dare look up but when he saw the beautifully manicured hands hand him the spec sheet, he couldn’t help looking up and falling in love with what he saw. But being bashful, he didn’t approach her straight off but actually changed his route so that he could stand with her at the platform while she waited for the train. It didn’t matter that he lived on the side of town. What mattered was that he follow his heart.
Everyone has a storyAnd there are as many stories as there are people.
T noticed Miss Shy standing at the back of the class trying desperately to look over the heads that towered over her. Their eyes met and he shrugged helplessly. That night after dinner, he wanted to apologise to her for not being her Knight in Shining Armour and accidentally bumped into her and her room mate while going up to the dorm. She shyly rubbed her arm as his heart melted at that gesture. He decided that day too be her gallant knight but the only way to her heart was via her friend who seemed bolder and more approachable. By the end of the term he fell in love with the room mate and Miss Shy remained Miss Shy.
KG Tilak was the first Indian to raise the call for freedom from British Rule,
Marie Stopes was the first woman who called for action for better women’s reproductive and sexual health, New Zealand was the first country in the world to allow women to vote
The list can go on and on and on.
Yet, despite the calls for universal suffrage, universal peace and universal brotherhood, in the words of Jean-Jaques Rousseau
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1788)
In the satirical novella Animal Farm ( which you can download and read here) Napoleon the Pig said that there are some animals who are more equal than others.
So I can go an and on and on about all the times that people stood up for causes yet the world is not free of prejudice, avarice, corruption, injustice, discrimination, intolerance, violence, poverty and a host of other evils despite all the clamour and the noise over the centuries, because human nature is what it is.
So does that mean that we stay put and do nothing? No because as long as we have a voice and the right to say what we feel,
Twenty- five Seven 