Just Another Blog

Was reading from Rashmi Bansal's extremely popular blog Youth Curry. (For those of you who do not know Rashmi Bansal, you may quickly understand that she is a young, for-the-young writer. She edits a well-known youth magazine called JAM -Just Another Magazine'. You may wiki her for a complete bio.)

It is surprising sometimes how what she writes is mistaken; more often than not, terribly mistaken. She was writing a philosophical summary of what Amir Khan tried to show through two of his movies- Taare Zameen Par and 3 idiots. I have been a fan of his movies for what you may call 'forever' now, and I think he did his best to deliver a really complicated everyday scenario to a common-man audience.

I call the scenario complicated not because lives involved in the story are complicated, but because there is such a complex web of lives that he needed to choose from, that it must have been inpossibly difficult to have zeroed out on a bunch to include in a movie and still manage to present a pretty justified overall picture!

Okay, getting back to Youth Curry, the lady wrote about why parents should let kids live their own dreams. She attracted several comments.

(I am very jealous. So many of my friends often manage to throw a i-read-the-blog-just-dint-comment at my face, every time I ask them about it. I somehow just do not manage to get enough comments on my blogs. Google stats tell me that my blog have an average of 18 visitors per day; which is good. But comments, hardly any!)

Anyway, one of those comments really caught my eye. This is what he wrote-

easy for you to say all this since you are a girl and you are living off your husband. Would you have married your husband if he were struggling in his chosen path? You ensured your safety by marrying a carreer oriented guy and now you are preaching to parents what they should do with their children?..seems hypocritical. And did you not seek your parents approval to marry your husband off whom you are living? 
Turn the tables around - if you had a son, would you be okay with him living the way you are living? You have a daughter, so you will give her complete freedom since women have a life of choice, but men do not have a choice of failure in life which you women have


I am really surprised at the sort of views people have about girls. It is as if girls have all the fun while the poor boys struggle through life!

Honestly, I think it is not really a matter of money. I am not sure I would marry a guy (and be a burden) if he was 'struggling' already. Would I fall in love with him? I could. And, definitely his bank balance would mean nothing in that case. And again, honestly, unlike what Pyaar Ka Punchnama says, girls are not always the trouble-makers. Anyway, I wouldn't want to be writing pages altogether in defence of an article that's not even mine.

There are a few things that I thought I must share too. One, money is nothing. I am coming back to this in a while.

Two, girls have difficulties in life that men will never know or understand, just like girls don't understand their points of view. It doesn't make women inferior, dependent or parasitic. It is just that men, very often tend to look at women being created by God to 'support' their existence. Understand that women have lived and evolved for as long in human history as men have and are thereby equally responsible for everything we are today.

Women have a life, that is different from what men have. We have a set of pleasure-giving activities that are varied from those of men. We have troubles coping with life. And, we have our own merits. I am in no way downplaying the role of men, but I am just saying that we are equally hard-working, smart and ambitious- technically. Culturally, you might still say we laze around more, but kindly try and look at who cooks your food, washes your clothes and washes your dishes before trying to make you happy in bed every night! If you are getting the money home, be thankful that a woman has made the home for you to bring your money.

Again, if you challenge me with particular cases, I might not have answers. You might be the guy cooking and washing up at home, but admit that for a majority of cases, you are an exception. I might also need to state that in my house itself, no man ever got home money. My dad died really early in life, so the women played double-roles. Hope the exceptions have their answers.

Coming back to one, money, for me is just a means for acquiring food when I am incapable of hunting or growing it. If money were alone, and there were no goods, there would be nothing you could possibly do with it, that do couldn't do with toilet paper. It is as if locking up a vegetarian in room filled with meat and asking him to feast on it. It would be of no use, all the delicious food!

I had travelled to a tribal village last year. Going so close to nature from an extremely opposite mechanical environment in the city, made a lot of things clear to me. I noticed in that village that there were no beggars.
It was a normal village- there were some well-to-do families and some poor ones. Despite their really bad financial conditions, people there just did not need to beg. Aged orphans would find solace in the temple, while some others managed to survive at the churches.

Back in the city, I noticed that it wasn't plain poverty that made all the difference. There had been poor people at the village too. What made the difference was the illusion of poverty and richness. It was the illusion of want for money.

It was the illusion of need.

In the small village, there was no illusion of need. Even if you had lived there and earned a lot of money, there was nothing you could spend it on. So people did not really need the money. Back in the city, I aw how there were so many things we assumed we needed.

We eat out- there are thousands of options- some of them that seem like the better ones.
We need better clothes almost always- there's something new in fashion- or we just got our salary.
We have a car- we need a bigger one- our neighbor always seems to have a better car.
We buy a house- we need more- we have the money to invest
We have a job- we could be paid more- our peers are running ahead


There's always an illusion that we re missing out on something, despite haveing just acquired what we wished for all the while.

If there was one thing I would wish the genie, if ever I found him, was to somehow eliminate money from our lives. No money, no illusion. We ll all at least know what we want.

And then, since there ll be no major difference, we would sit back and do the work we love doing most!

P. S. : The economy of any country relies on this illusion of need of people. That's what helps companies market products and make-believe that the customer needs them most. If not for that illusion, there would be no economy!