I grew up watching
Bollywood with a huge influence of Mr Amitabh B. The test of memory as a kid
was how many dialogues I could remember of AB Sr. One dialogue that had a huge
impact on me and my generation was ‘Mard ko dard nahi hota’. Whenever I got
hurt and use to whine in pain I always doubted my own manliness because of this
super dialogue from my superstar. I felt obligated towards this landmark
dialogue. The heroes of my earlier years were all strong, matured, right, ethical,
super understanding, sacrificing etc. The hero would take care of their
parents, protect the sister, won’t cheat on the heroine, eliminate the
anti-socials, give justice to the poor, robin hood types and the list goes on. There
wasn’t anything wrong in them. Eventually with a trend of women-oriented movies
coming up even the heroines started displaying strength, maturity and a sense
of righteousness through their characters. Everything seemed to be so ideal
where the heroes and heroines just didn’t have any shortcomings. The landmark
dialogue then became applicable to the female fraternity as well. A hero would
bear 6 bullets and still keep fighting whereas the villain would breathe last
even with one bullet. All because our heroes were meant to be strong.
I was actually
growing up with these folks who were apparently ideals, too much of pressure
matching up to them. We were all growing getting trained to be right, perfect
and strong.
While we were
departing from college we had sessions on the tricks to crack job interviews. One
of the usual questions asked during interviews of those days was to give out 3
strengths and 3 weaknesses. The trainer told us that while your strengths
should always be outstanding, even the weaknesses that you share should be
camouflaged strengths. In short even the weaknesses that we mention should
indirectly sound like strengths. It was all about strengths, ethics and giving
all right answers. That clearly meant that for getting a good job, I needed to
have lot of strengths, even my weaknesses had to sound like strengths,
everything had to be right with lot of maturity.
The same era had one
more unconventional guy named Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors. A
singer, songwriter, poet, the lizard king. He led a controversial life and had
a mysterious death at the age of 27. Had he been alive today, he would have
been almost the same age of Mr. Bachchan.
One of his famous quotes
said “People are afraid of themselves, of their own
reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but
that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that
pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to
feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re
wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the
experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is
a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel
ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality.
You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” It was a good read of
those days but somehow Jim would come across as a loser in front of the iconic
Mr. Bachchan. As a youth even I resorted to AB Sr. as been strong seemed to
more lucrative.
It took me almost a
decade to understand what Jim was trying to say through his quotes and now
after getting exhausted living Mr Bachchan I feel Jim Morrison made lot of
sense.
We always want to
project to others, a side which is right, perfect, strong, kind, and ethical. In
case we are passing through a rough patch, instead of dealing with it we prefer
distracting ourselves or disconnecting ourselves from all.
I was reading a
blog on how a woman did a personal makeover, went on a world tour, joined the
gym, started partying hard and indulged in retail therapies just to deal with
her depression. The comments on that blog were all praises on how the woman had
bounced back strongly from her depression. A thought to ponder, was she really dealing
with her reason for depression or was just distracting herself. While we think
that we have bounced back the fact remains that we just keep distracting
ourselves.
We keep treating
the symptoms and conveniently ignore addressing the root cause because Mard Ko
Dard Nahi Hota. We keep distracting ourselves, we keep running away from our
predicaments eventually resulting in things getting more compounded and
complicated leading to people taking unwanted and undesired steps in life. The
little demons turn into dangerous monsters. And all this because we don’t want
to accept that there is something going wrong.
People enjoy
self-pride in been strong, right, kind and ethical without realising that the
actual strength lies in understanding, accepting and dealing with our
short-comings and bad situations.
One of my favourite villains Joker (batman
villain) says “Give a man a mask and he will show you his true face”. It
actually makes lot of sense as we all are bogged down by too much social
obligations resulting in us losing our genuineness. It’s ok to have a bad phase
in life, its ok not to have a happening life, its ok to have had a bad relation,
its ok to have lost some reputation, its ok to be unsuccessful, its ok to be
selfish, wrong, unethical at times. People who love you would anyways love you;
rather the advantage here is you may get rid of all the hypocrites from your
life. As someone rightly said that “just
one hole in my pocket and I ended up losing more relations than coins”.
As we start the New
Year, may we all experience freedom from self-imposed compulsion of been right
and strong always.
Happy New Year to
all.
