Bachpan Ka Piyar?

There was a debate about right and wrong, about the shades of grey that pollute the severity of black and white. And I in my parochial views found it so hard to understand.

Questions:

1. What is fidelity? Is it only prompted by something legal or is it binding without a written contract?
2. If it is the latter then what constitutes a breach? How permeable is the line and how often is it permeated before you have officially crossed it?
3. Does age have a bearing on fidelity? If you are young and are testing the waters, so to speak, are you more liable to break out of a relationship, than say, if you were older.
4. What is a girl friend? Is she a girl who happens to be your friend, among a multitude of girls who are also your friends? Or is she exclusively your girl friend, who though a girl, is ‘first among equals’? Does the use of legal titles render people more faithful?
5. And, if she is ‘first among equals’, then applying the rules of fair choice and democracy, is she as open to being ousted (as any new candiate) as soon as there is a change in votes in favour for a better representative of the title?
6. And lastly, what guarantee is there that what you have now found is any more real than what you had before? Is life to be a series of rolls in the proverbial rolling stone, then at what point in the future do you realize (retrospectively, of course) that many rolls ago, that so-and-so moss was the moss of your destiny (but since you kept rolling, you passed it by)?

Now the Author has always had a stern stance on the subject. She has always believed that the poor heart is bound by genetics to flip easily (though justifiably) at many a pretty cause. But it is the head and not heart that maintains relationships. Thus all fidelity resides in the head.

A fire when dying can alight again on a mere breeze. There is no need to stroke. The embers will burn on their own. Everyone has embers, and it is the heart that strokes a dying fire in an effort to rekindle it, while the head maintains objectivity and rationalises that there is enough heat in embers alone. That, that is enough. Why rake a fire, when if it burns again, you can’t control it? Thus, the Author maintains that all illusions (for they are eventually just that) of love, hate, passion, happiness, gratitude and ungratefulness, among others, are all a result of the mind’s call on issues.

So when you love, you love with your head and not your heart, because the heart in essence is unfaithful.

Now critics to the theory find this objectifying of such raging passions, the beauty and truth of which they insist lies in the temporal ecstasy of the moment, to be such a clinical and cold compartmentalization of such a sensational feeling that it cannot withstand any real test of time, because by virtue of the terms within which it is defined, is it without feeling.
But then again, what is feeling?
Is it not just a passing sensation---a momentary flutter of neurons, fed later by the mind’s multiple readings and analysis in a desperate attempt to make more of it. Alternatively, it could be nothing. If the mind thought so, it would be nothing.

Critics again insist that anything devoid of Heart is bound to fail. Now the Author doesn’t propose an existence without the Heart. But life in general is not the fairy tale version told in movies and books. Often it is coupled with strange compromises that do not appear thus when they first meet you at the many turns in life. And it at these moments when the heart, coupled with the mind makes the right, the noble, decision.

Again, the critics raise a clarion call to stop the Author in her tracks. “So in the quest for nobility is one to sacrifice the search, or perhaps submit at the pinnacle at which lies Fulfilment?” they ask, rallying behind that elusive lady, who in collusion with Desire casts a weak web.

Now place Fulfilment against Contentedness. Whereas the former looks to something to find its self, the latter looks within to find what it seeks. Contentedness is a result of introspection and a sense of peace within the existing framework, where as Fulfilment seeks an outside agent (without assured proof of completing the alpha objective) to complete the circle. Thus of the two, which is more desirable?

Interestingly when one juxtaposes passion with happiness, one gets the same philosophy. The former offers momentary satisfaction, whereas the latter again promises something more lasting.

The critics again bring to the table discussions centred around basic questions regarding the positive and negative attitudes towards the life of various system’s of morality.
But going back to our earlier discussion; Is it not so much easier with marginally defined black and white. No grey.

THE DEFINING QUESTION:
How much refuge can one take in Grey before one has officially permeated the line?