User-Friendly Rich Boyfriends & Influential Friends! Kareena Kapoor Chronicles It For Bollywood

KALYUGS NEW 'LOVE YOU'

Whatever happened to the friends you stood and stared with. The ones you met because you wanted to ‘hang out’ with, for no reason but that you liked each other. Not ‘loved’ each other instantly, but grew fond of over time and most importantly tide. High-tide. Not because you wanted to network, raise money, sponge on, but because you wanted to chat, read, grow and know together. 

Yes, I know, it’s all very old fashioned and not at all ‘cool’. So then my question is, what is cool? To have boyfriends who ‘buy you presents’, ‘pick you up and drop you and spend on you’ , “have a big home in a good place” to free-load on until you find someone ‘richer’ you can free-load on and ‘butter-up’? Or you dump him when he doesn’t deliver on the picking up dropping and big bucks?

Two girls standing cheek to cheek saying ‘loooooove you” in a shrill sing-song voice to each other. They are posing for a BBM picture to declare their love for each other to the world. Never mind what is in their hearts. The heart is full of what you can extract from your friend to better your prospects in life. After all this is supposed to be a kalyug phenomenon. Where love is the most easily abused word. Like toilet paper. Let’s not even get into loyalty and longevity. ‘Love you’ in today’s lingo usually means, I have ‘x’ number of agendas with you, you are useful to me and I intend to milk you for all you’ve got. Once I’m ‘done’ with you, I’ll just evaporate. 

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The friend’s hidden agendas to get to know more people through you and to achieve more power socially it was, that had brought on the overwhelming love, that brought on the ‘butter up’ syndrome.  It might sound harsh, but your friend was a smooth speaking sales-girl at heart. 

Madhur Bhandarkar so aptly shows how Kareena Kapoor in 'Heroine' uses cricketer Randeep Hooda to get a role in a film, and then promptly moves on. Madhur is well known to play fly on the wall to life and reproduce some ugly facts on celluloid, real world chronicle of our times what say?

 People feel used, however rich or famous they are, Salman Khan known to be sensitive and giving, had allegedly called SRK a "matlabi insaan" who 'picks up the phone only when he needs people'. That was before they ostensibly made up. True or not that's how Salman’d felt, and that's the way people feel until you take the time and trouble to work at it or work it out. Shah Rukh Khan did take the trouble!  It takes investment and effort to build relationships, if you’re the person with a value system, breeding and have seen strong relationships with your family. Unless of course the game was about extracting all the usefulness, and you’ve been seen for what you are. In which case it’s better to wake up and smell the coffee...

Friendship, companionship and bonding do exist, but just like the forest, animals and trees- man himself seems to be denuding it out of the world. And fast. It is the trend of our times. Relatives and brothers and sisters are materialistically dismantling each other. Relationships and friendships like greenery and wildlife is another causality to man’s material and technical evolution. I’m wondering if a time may come when if we need a hug we’ll have to turn on a Robot to tide us over someday.

I quote famed film-maker Vidhu Vinod Chopra on our times “I have no friends beyond an extended cinema family. My expectations from friendship are so great that in the present situation it is difficult to get a real friend, because everybody is so self-centred and wants to use you in one way or the other, or get used to move on.”

 And yet, I know from experience that one can survive life’s ravages with a friend at hand better. Luckily I have friends who've stood the test of high notes and low notes that make the music of life. Even life’s most trying moments can be crossed over with uncomplicated friendships of spontaneity and action, where you could talk, laugh and it would not really matter what you spent time doing, because being together is more important than having an agenda. If  you have a real friend, cling to him or her. Not a con-man out to use you for their hidden agenda’s, where the real motivator could be very different to what you think it is. True friendships and relationships have no agendas.

Just a few short years ago, one sat at the window, and delighted at the chirping of the sparrows.  One wonders where they've disappeared. The mind processes are working along the same track now vis- a-vis 'friends’. Have they disappeared? I have friends, indeed, good friends, but I now need to consider it the benediction of fortune. The loneliness around, the stories one hears, once the topic is raised, of betrayal, deceit, disloyalty, back-biting, raise goose.-bumps. One philosophically glosses over it as an inherent human trait, malignant even in the hoary times of the Mahabharat. But friendship with the accompaniment of loyalty, helping, standing by, or just plain companionship without agenda, was almost taken for granted until awhile ago. Literature and movies Hollywood and Bollywood, brought to us heart wrenching tales of its nobility and test.

These too are inherent human traits. So, can sociologists explain the see-saw tilting so much and so fast to the undesirable side. Already 'Family bonds'  are going the way of the forests and tigers! It’s not enough to nod ones head and say 'Materialism'. It’s a malaise if not dealt with, will leave a society not worth the epithet. I think the present times have inculcated and ingrained selfishness, competition and gain as the prime path to happiness.  But thìs 'Scrooge' like existence defeats itself. It’s a lonely world where its each one for himself. We HAVE TO RETRACE OUR PATH and teach the child the simpler more fulfilling joy of sharing, caring; lending  a hand; holding a hand;  laughing together and crying together. The term 'riches' takes on a richer meaning.

The question is how do you solve this fast spreading epidemic?

•  By quashing the ego that believes you are so attractive and engaging that everyone gravitates and loves you instantly. 
• By waking up to the fact that it is not you but what you bring to the table that is attractive. By turning on our higher intelligence to survive the coming decades. 
• By tuning into ones emotional intelligence with love, compassion, creativity, inspiration, and especially learning from these inspirational experiences that might look harsh but are great learning’s which grow your immunity and nourish long-term mental and emotional health.

I’d say it is time to tap the higher consciousness and  spiritual intelligence and maturity to enhance a larger sense of self and then you automatically encourage and attract the beautiful friends , rare and beautiful and not easy to come by. Like sifting the chaff from the wheat.

Nisha JamVwal

Written For & Published in Deccan Chronicle & Asian Age

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