CONNECTIONS:

       Heres the gist of a conversation I had on fb with a female colleague ive know for years:

       SHE:Life is too complicated..Dont try to find d answers, Bcoz........when v find d answers, lyf     changes d questions...............

       ME: life is simple actualy, eat, drink, sleep, love...WE have complicated it!

      SHE: Life is more than eat drink sleep. Running from facts is cowardice. No other word. Escapism is another word of course! In fact Aneeta, when you said love everything else came in - eat drink sleep seemed small stuff! Search for your answers or eat drink sleep! Could not resist, Aneeta. Don't take it personally:). I know you and I don't need to evaluate or judge you. Or rather who am I to judge?! We are different personalities and I respect you for who you are.

        ME:running away from the fact that life is in fact simple and entails eat, drink sleep and love, is ignorance of the highest order, in fact! :) eat, drink, sleep, is part of love..actually..i wanted to emphasise simplicity, hence use of those words..once the word love is used, suddenly it gets complicated, cause love is understood to be very complicated... ive searched for my answers, and thats the answer i got!...life is very very simple, and we have complicated it with our egoes! And yeah,, nothing personal...in fact its good to get opposing views, it makes tweaking my thoughts easier.

       SHE:I wrote all those things knowing its you:). With anybody else I would have to exercise caution!

          I start my blog with this conversation, and it’s her last line I wish  draw the attention to.

          I’ve known this person for like almost 15 years, and we never had an easy going relationship. We use to be in the same lunch group, and I always found her to be a person who was different from the others, not because she was naturally different, but because she wanted to be ‘seen’ as different.

            So she was a vegan even before we knew what it was all about( I mean we know about vegetarians sticking up their noses at the non vegetarians, but what is this new snob thing going around?)  she was the first woman I knew in government circles who went to cyber cafes to chat up with friends, she was the one who got a haircut from a male hairdresser long before it became rather common, she took pride in telling us stories about how she locked her mother in law out of the house by mistake, of how she gave wrong directions to a girl by mistake, and how the girl had lost almost 2 hours, of how she believed that children should be allowed to run amok in restaurants cause they are children.

          In fact we were almost always at logger heads, on almost all topics. Most of the time my ‘parent’ state revolted against her ‘cultivated’ childishness, I guess, while maybe her ‘child’ found me too intimidating. I finally learnt that discretion is the better part of valor, if we happened to have opposing views on any subject, as the others in the lunch group weren’t much interested in our verbal spats.

           This spat also I wouldn’t have got involved, if it wasn’t online, and if I hadn’t been able to soften my blows with etiquette. But the last line just floored me.. she actually never really resented my opposing her, in fact, she was open with me only because it was me, and she didn’t have to fear or exercise caution.

           Suddenly the 15 years of animosity just evaporated. I now feel light when I think about her. In that one line, online we connected!