As we walk through life, we learn a lot of things, especially about what we truly like and what we dislike and the one of the primary parts of our likes and dislikes are people.
Whether we like it or not, our lives are directly or indirectly associated with people, since almost all of us are part of this society that has resulted from our years of hard work to create and sustain a system where our lives function efficiently with the help of each other.
But one of the major problems of all this is the people we don’t like. In the past, there was a greater perceived clarity of the right and wrong and the need to climb upon a stringent flight of stairs laid out by those before us as the one and only right path. But as we have grown, we know there is a lot more to it than what one path is capable of defining.
So, the people we don’t like, we wish there were few of them but there are a lot. They are in the family, on the street, in the trains and buses we commute daily, at our workplaces, schools, colleges and businesses etc. The great thing is, you can ignore most of them, the worst thing is some of them are going to stay in your life and are going to willingly or unwillingly try to hamper your peace and happiness.
I have an aunt. I don’t talk to her at all in the present and that’s a miracle to be honest. I never thought I would see the end of her attempts to interfere with my life. My father was the most successful of his siblings and my aunt for some reason had this need to stay on her brother’s good side. So, she would go out of her way to try and impress my father and make him happy.
The problem with this was that I was more than often the medium of creating the impression and she took it to levels far worse. For example, once my father sent me to pay the internet bill, back then one had to go to the service provider’s establishment to pay for it. So, I went to their office and found it closed, so I came back and my aunt had come for a visit, what did she say? “You should have waited an hour or two to ensure their office wouldn’t open again” She seriously wanted me to wait out there in the afternoon summer heat for an hour or two. There were times when I couldn’t understand whether she was joking or not, because my grandparents had spared no effort to educate her well.
I won’t say just because one is gone, there are no longer people of such kind in my life. But as I have grown to assert greater control over my life the interference has reduced quite a bit, nonetheless the fact remains, you can’t like them all or be fine with them all and it’s frankly not possible, we all have grown differently in different environments and within different circumstances.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
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