Guest blogger: Nandita Chakraborty
8 JULY 2018by arrawebmaster
📷Test to my sobriety
Rumi once said: “The wound is the place where the light enters you—if you let it.”
Similarly love—what can I say about love—if you are touched by it or if you let it enter, it will engulf you in its glory—it’s like an adrenalin rush, like alcohol to an alcoholic. At first a drop will hit you with its welcoming note. Then after a glass or two, you are a little hysterical. You are either talking little more or just like a sitting duck. Slowly giving in but not too fast and a little slow.
The next day arrives and you begin to play your little charade, enjoying announcing to the world of your little hangover. Perhaps you are just browsing … you are just enjoying being a little tipsy.
By now you have pretty much had your fears down pat and you have a robust authority over yourself and the situation. But you are not ‘yet’ in control. You will think of the person for just a thought and then move on. Then you start spending more time with that person and sometimes becomes most of the time. You become inefficient, non-reliable and then slowly every part of your body becomes redundant. You are breathing, but you are not effective; you are eating, but you are not tasting; you are smelling the stench of your poor old soul. By this time your brain is completely in its final stages: surrendering to your heart.
Now the same person you didn’t even know, who was a stranger … now you need that person for 24 hours a day … every second, every minute and every hour of the day. How’s that possible?
Ladies and gentlemen—you have just failed the test of sobriety. The perfect definition of a love addict. Just like any alcoholic you will beg, borrow and steal and you are even ready to sacrifice your pride.
I have met a lot of people and I can’t help but say, based on my own experiences, that we have all chased a fairy tale. I personally went and looked for it but never got it! I complained, got overwhelmed, but then gave up. I have seen people whinge: ‘Oh! Maybe I have done something to disappoint him’ and the most classic ‘You don’t deserve me’ and so on—the list is endless.
Then the blame starts. We blame each other and question our own worthiness. It’s just not between a man and a woman, it’s embedded in every relationship where love is involved.
We suffer because the love we anticipate is denied. Then what happens? We GET HURT. We get hurt unnecessarily or we can say we suffer silently, torturing ourselves, dying every day, withering inside, complicating things until we exhaust to any reasoning.
We shouldn’t have to go through this at all. Then again if we don’t go through this we wouldn’t be able to appreciate the change—the greater sense of peace.
Yes, it’s funny, but then this is the time when we are more tuned with ourselves than ever before, we listen to everything that goes around us, we fight within ourselves to evolve and to grow
To me that is the key to life.
Finally, we don’t know why it happens and how it happens, but that growth, that fight for life transforms us. To me writing is the translation, my meditation to all my pains.
📷Rosemary’s Retribution Rosemary’s Retribution is set in Kolkatta in 1975 follows a thick plot of family secrets and the woes of cross cultural marriage. It follows the story of Shabana and Ted, one a young diplomat from Melbourne and the other a maid in the foreign office in Calcutta. The unconventional friendship between the two turns to love under the shadow of Urdu poetry and western literature. Against cultural differences, both fight for social acceptance and find themselves caught in a web of secrets and betrayal that spans forty years.
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