I prefer taking the window seat in the cab which is third from the beginning and second from the end. Today luckily I was the first pick up, so I choose my favorite seat. I take the two seater so that I and my sis can sit, but today since we had a fight in the morning, she didn’t sit with me. The activity which I usually do in the mornings is to read a book and at night during my travel time, I listen to music. In the mornings when I read book, I prefer to keep the things in hand on my side so that it is convenient for me to read.
So I was sitting and started to read the book, Namesake, sorry I just read 15 minutes a day so it’s taking me more than usual to finish it. So in many of my earlier blogs also there has been reference of the book. As I was reading another person boarded the cab, he sat in last seat and in two minutes changed the seat next to mind, opening the half opened window of mine , fully. We are a democratic country, and he had the freedom to sit anywhere he wanted, I took my bag and put it at the back seat. As I was reading, I was feeling uncomfortable, not for the fact that the person was sitting next to me but also that he took away my space. In my MBA we were taught every individual had his comfort space around him/her which has to be understood and if you talk going inside his comfort space, his attention to your words will be reduced so is the case when you are too far away from the comfort space.
I was thinking all this, I was wondering comfort space may not only being around, but in terms of topics, issues and involvement of an individual in our lives. There may have been people in whose life I got in their comfort space by getting myself so much involved d in their life that they have got uncomfortable with me, or maybe there are people who try to get into my comfort space making things uncomfortable for me. This was all back mind thought process, in the actual I was reading and the story revolved around the fact that Ashima, wife of Ashoke is giving her last party to her friends and family after the death of her husband before selling the house in America in which she and her husband started their lives. And she is going back to her roots in Calcutta, but she thinks she is very different from what she once had come from Calcutta.
I started thinking how lives change, and that’s something we don’t imagine to change in the way. I was born here in Chennai and now that I have come back to my roots, yet things may not the same, people may be, places may be the same, but I am not the same person as what I had left. I have my passport, license, my college, my schools everything which has an address of Delhi. When I will be back home in Delhi, I know what I am not supposed to do, all of which I am doing here.
I at times wonder how my parents could move to strange place and they have created a beautiful life around them, where every stranger is a family. It’s not just my parents, but thousands of Tamilians who have moved away from their life in search of a new life and created a life in a place so strange.
Here within the families itself I observed the comfort space are so different that I doubt how much they all can get involved in each other lives. Everyone says we are social and have their own circles of friends of and non family-families and that’s their life. Though case in similar for our lives in Delhi, but the difference is that it’s a life where everyone came together to help the ones who need, as they all knew we have none other than these people who are a family to us. And that’s a case especially with people like my parents who are first generations settlers in a place outside their own native places.
And when we settle in a place which is not our own, our thought process, mindset changes not just because we started to live there, because there is a need to change. I have to eat the kind of food they eat there, not because we are copying them, but that’s what is available there, and with time we get habituated to the foods that it can’t be changed so soon again when we are back. It’s just that the comfort spaces change according to the place, and if I am asked to come back to comfort zone according to this place, it has to be understood that I have developed this comfort space during 20 years of my life, the major part of my life.
All the thoughts apart, I don’t know how my life is going to change in next twenty years; I will not be same person as what I am today. I even don’t know if things will change for good or for bad. How many good situations I have to see in life, what all I have to compromise and what all god will give me, what I deserve, but I doubt if my love for Delhi will ever reduce because that’s the place where I have seen all the Ups and Downs of my life. But for my parents, their preferences changed as they started liking a place which they kind off moved to, when they were in the same situation as I am now. Or I wonder if it is with experience that we would grow mature and accept everything happily that’s come on our way, because at the end of the day, we all have one life, which we have to live, what so ever it be, how so ever it be. My parents choose to live happily instead of regretting what they don’t have, they accepted what they have.
One last thought is, is that the place they started loving, or is it the people around whose support increased their love for the place?
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