MUMBAI...THE KILLER OF ALL RELATIONSHIPS

17 years… yup, it’s been 17 long years since I moved, bag and baggage, to this city of dreams, as someone called it then… With the hope that one day I will make my dreams come true… Dreams of making it big, of seeing my name flashing on neon signs, of leaving my mark in the city… I dreamt of making a success out of my life, and followed this dream to Mumbai… But while dreaming these bright, glittering dreams, I never, for once imagined that I’ll fall in love here… that I’d find relationships and my life partner here somewhere… I never thought of finding someone I could cherish or care for… Like many before me and countless after me, I came to Mumbai for one reason and one reason alone--I was in a tearing hurry to make my dreams come true. I had to do it before someone took it away from me. We all are in a rush, hoping that we can get there before someone else does. But in the race to reach the finishing line, we forget that there are two parts of our personality; and one without the other leaves us incomplete… Each one of us has a yin as well as yang in our system… A  materialistic part that takes care of the nuts and bolts of our life… And then there is the emotional side, the one that looks after the matters of the heart. Mumbai develops one side of our personalities to the hilt, but kills the other part completely… Or, if not kills then at least stops it from prospering… Everything is possible in this city of dreams, everything, except relationships, that is.

Let’s analyse the breeding ground for a healthy relationship… It needs nurturing, an understanding of the other person and the effort to spend time with each other… and therein lies the biggest problem… TIME, the one thing that none of us have. The city that promises you the moon and the stars robs you of the most precious gift you can give a person--the gift of time. Because all your time is spent in chasing the elusive dream that drew you to the city in the first place. We spend our time taking care of the humdrum of daily life, of trying to keep up with the expenses that increase every year no matter how hard you try to bring them down… Time is taken away in commuting to and fro, by the BlackBerry, by the deadline that is forever looming large… And whatever little time you manage to squeeze out of your our everyday existence, you’re expected to give to your partner. Because even your relationships need time. But in this constant struggle to make time for everything and everyone, we forget to make time for the most important person in our life--ourselves. Time for ourselves to simply sit back and take a breather from life, to switch off your brain and think of nothing at all. And I feel that when we don’t get time for ourselves, we start resenting things that take away the little time we have away from us… our work, our dreams, and, yes, even our partner and our relationship… The cracks start to appear and before we know it, the love that we were trying to nurture turns into something else... We reach a stage where we start blaming our relationship for stealing this precious time from us… I know so many couples where the man and woman have disagreements on what to do on a weekend… It starts with disagreements, snowballs into fights and ultimately ends up killing what made the relationship so beautiful at one point in time… We’d like nothing more than to spend the weekend with the object of our desire when we’re courting the person, but later, we start detesting the forced togetherness, the weekends that we wanted just for ourselves but were made to share. Because we really needed that alone time. Sounds familiar??

Often, our job needs us to be nice to people… Sometimes we need to be nice to perfect assholes that you would rather be rude to and tell them exactly what you think of them… But we can’t. Instead, we spend almost 10 to 12 hours a day being nice to them, simply because our job demands it... And after work, we’re forced to put up with people driving like idiots on the roads. You want to yell obscenities, but all you can do is grind your teeth and wait for the ordeal to get over and you finally reach home. By the time we get back home, the being nice to everyone business has so sapped us of our energies that most of us simply give up. We just don’t have it in us to be nice to anyone anymore. Again, sounds familiar? But that isn’t the end of the story. Because back home, the questions are waiting, loaded and ready to be fired. Why aren’t you being nice today ? Why are you so quiet today? What happened at work today? And the answer to all these questions is just one--I. Don’t. Want. To. Talk. About. It!!! It’s no one person’s fault; but having to be nice to people day after day and week after week sometimes just saps our ability to be nice anymore and that again contributes to the death of a relationship….

Everywhere around this city, all you see is concrete…. Buildings without a heart… Soulless constructions of steel and mortar… Have we also somewhere become like structures of steel and mortar? Beautiful, but without a heart ??? Are we spending so much time feeding the yin in our personality that we’ve forgotten that yang needs nurturing as well? That we need to look after the part that cherishes moments and encourages us to think from our heart, to value more than just the bank balance? I think we have. The city of dreams has no place for the heart and for relationships... Not until we are jolted out of our false reality and made to realise that life isn’t so much about the so-called success or the size of our bank balance. It doesn’t really matter whether you have a 3 or 4 or 5-room apartment, because honestly, we use just about the same space to live in that we did as kids… And we can do without the frills if the heart is in the right place… Just don’t let it turn into concrete…

Kahin building kahin trame
Kahin motor kahin mill..
Milta hain yahan sab kuch bas milta nahin dil …
Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan …

PS: This, I am guessing, is true for many other so-called BIG cities… But hey, I live in Mumbai!