After Riding Off Into The Sunset

I always wonder what happens after 'happily ever after'. I highly doubt anything ever remains happily ever after. It isn't the way of the world. After Simran grabs Raj's hand and takes the train to her future, what happens? He doesn't have a job, neither does she. What are they going to do? Live off their parents? He's easygoing, she's slightly neurotic. In what universe is that relationship ever going to work out? What about all those Bollywood films which show these college going kids getting married without having done anything worthwhile. Like, um, getting a degree perhaps? Or standing on your own two feet? No, no we must get you married first and foremost. At least they aren't showing that anymore in the current Bollywood films. Girls are standing on their own two feet. In 2 States, she has an MBA and is doing as well, or even better than her boyfriend. Queen is not about her finding a man, but about her finding herself. Khoobsurat, though not a geat film, did show her as a physiotherapist. But that isn't the point of this post. The point is, how many of those love stories actually succeed?
How long before you see all their flaws? How long before the phase of excitement about forbidden love wears out? Can the magic actually remain? How do we know? Would Romeo and Juliet have worked out if their families had accepted them? You have to admit, part of the attraction was the fact that they were from rival families. So what happens when the curtains close? What happens when life happens? It can't be all passion and looking at your partner through rose-coloured glasses? I guess movies don't show it because we don't want to see it. We don't want to see a relationship falling apart. It's too real. Going to a typical romantic movies is almost like wanting to forget everything for a while. Just wanting to live a dream for two hours. Whether it's by staring into Fawad Khan or Shahrukh Khan's dreamy eyes, or by drowning blissfully in the incredible voice of Atif Aslam and several other singers. It's interesting to imagine what it would be like to look like one of the actresses and have someone who looks like Hrithik Roshan serenade us.
I guess I'm just one of those people who likes to think about what happens after the film ends. Do Bunny and Naina stay together? Or is his desire to travel the world stronger than his love for her? How can she expect him to give up what he loves when she won't? Will he get bored of the everyday 'dal chawal'? How is that a fair relationship? Despite my habit of doing this, I still love to watch and read love stories. It's nice pretending that the world is perfect for just a little while. We live in reality most of the time, we deserve to fantasize a little. It's funny how I found a GIF that actually described this post.

Finding Your Inner Crazy

We live in strange times; where, the physical attractiveness of someone is determined by the number of likes on their Facebook profile picture, popularity by the number of followers on Instagram, talent by the number of followers on Tumblr, Wordpress or Blogger. Strange, isn't it? There was the Neoclassical age, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of the Romantics, the Renaissance and now? What would this age be called? The Age of the Emoticons? Or the Age of Narcissism? We're all so caught up with our own lives, we don't even know what's going on in the lives of our friends and families. We're concerned about our hair. We're concerned about our body. We're concerned about our image. We're concerned only with our own opinion, with our own "gift". It's all about me, me, me.
We don't even stop to acknowledge the fact that our work, whatever it may be, hasn't been compared to the  We believe we are the best. Us aspiring writers fancy ourselves the next J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K. Rowling. The aspiring photographers fancy themselves the next big thing. The aspiring dancers imagine they're the next sensation to take the stage by storm. The singers hope to achieve the fame that Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar did and the bands want to be The Beatles. And that's good. It's great that all of us have such high expectations of ourselves. What we have to ensure is that those aims of ours aren't lofty and beyond our reach. All of us start out aiming for the stars and beyond. Most of us crash and burn. As much as we hate to admit it, all of us can't be great. So, my question to you is, are you going to risk crashing and burning to go after something you love? Do you really love it? Or do you give up and choose the more traditional route and become part of the mundane but practical workforce? That's the real test, isn't it? Being crazy enough to jump off the deep end? This new year, let's search within and find the crazy that all of us have tried to hide within ourselves and attempted to stamp into oblivion. It's nice to be crazy sometimes.