Relationships

     Life may be viewed as a gift or a struggle. Truly speaking it has to be viewed only in terms of a series of relationships..We start with our relationship with our mother who had borne us for nine months and pampered us and looked after every need of ours. Fed, bathed,clothed and cared for in a manner only a mother can.

I remember seeing a picture of a very very old woman, shrunken, toothless and doddering. The caption it was that set me thinking. It said “Somebody’s Darling Mother’. The negative reaction which the picture evoked initially, vanished and I saw in my mind’s eye an adoring son who was borne, bathed. clothed and cared for by this mother of his. Every mother is a darling mother to her off-spring. A poet had said God cannot be everywhere; so he created Mother– what a fine expression.

Next comes the father who moulds and shapes your mind with his own example and through precepts introduces one to GOD by telling stories and parables from Hindu mythology .. The benchmarks indicated by him gives a meaning and motive to our lives.

As we move along and grow, our ties with not only mother and father but with brothers, sisters, cousins, get stronger.We live, eat, laugh, struggle, and cry with them and the ties get greater permanence in our minds and hearts.. We then move on into the wide world and who stands foremost in our minds? Friends. Yes, friends, be it in schools or colleges or neighborhoods or offices. Some of either sex are of course special and last a lifetime.

Then life throws you in the company of a woman whom you marry ..Love , whether before or after marriage, blossoms and takes concrete or rather ‘flesh and blood’ shape in the form of children..Then, grandchildren and so on. Relationships grow, ever-widening circle like the water in a pond into which a pebble is thrown.

       And then the final journey from which no traveler returns.. Communion with one’s God..Peace. Tranquility.That is life. Without all those relationships, what are we?