Skip to main content

Describe you in a word? I couldn't do it in a hundred!

It seems to have gone out of fashion lately, but when I was new to Facebook, it was very common to have someone tag you in a photograph that said, 'Describe me in one word'. Perhaps I take it too seriously, but such things have always made me uncomfortable. A person has so many sides to himself or herself! Honestly, I think that mentioning a single aspect would lead to overlooking  so many other vital ones that make the person who he or she is.
And things like being kind or caring just don't count (according to me, at least), because they're prerequisites for being a good friend!

For example- has anyone ever asked you who your BEST friend is? For as far back as I can remember, I have never had an answer to that question, because I don't have a single best friend. I have  groups of people whom I love very, very much, but I still love them all equally. The odd thing is the people who fall into this category have widely differing personality traits, albeit some basic similarities. Consequently, I'm a different 'me' with each group! It would be wrong to say I'm being more natural with one person, it's just that different sides of me a brought out with different people, which brings us back to the original point. I think it would would be impossible to describe all those 'mes' (or anyone else) in a  word. People are complex entities, and what we see depends on who we are and who they are with us. Isn't it fascinating?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tradition!

In India, the generation of the twenty first century is faced with a decision: to be traditional or  be 'not traditional'. Note that I have used neither 'modern' nor 'western' as the opposite of 'traditional' because it is not. The culture and tradtions we inherit from our ancestors form a significant part of our identity. People who disown their culture will need to start from scratch and build a new identity to replace something that took generations of experience to create. Now,considering that we are descended from those who created the traditions we follow, which means that we share genes, and perhaps a few common traits and interests with them, isn't our culture in some ways catered specifically to us and consequently, doesn't it have the highest chance of suiting us? Before you start to call me prejudiced, here's the other side of the argument. Times have changed considerably. Certain customs that came into being a few centuries ag...

Perfection

There are lots of quotes out there about how imperfection is the true perfection and how having some imperfections makes one better .But like the fox and the grapes (don’t ask me why a fox would want grapes), I think that we just find it hard to appreciate what we can never reach. For a long time, even I never liked perfect things. For instance, I disliked traditional rangoli designs because they were perfectly symmetric. I couldn’t draw them, so I decided that I preferred free hand drawings.  However, my attitude has changed lately. The change started when we began to study circles in class nine. Circles are just so… perfect. Think about it- from the fact that every single point on it equidistant from the same single point, to the fact that the ratio between circumference and diameter is always constant, there are so many amazing results that can be obtained from that simple shape! That’s probably why I love mathematics too. It is a perfect subject. If a law exists, it al...

Thoughts from lonely days

Some nights before I started to write this in mid-2022, I dreamt that I was in an aircraft that was plummeting to the earth. I was not surprised by this dream - less than a week had passed since a tragic plane crash in China. What did surprise me was that I had continued to hope that the plane would right itself until the very end. So when I woke up, breathing hard, still alive, what upset me the most about my nightmare was not that the plane had crashed, but that I had not made peace with my death in those final moments.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about death in the last two years; many of us probably did as we anxiously watched counters on dashboards, each uptick marking the end of another human life. On nights when my overactive imagination conjured up terrible scenarios, I protected myself by taking a mental step back and reminding myself that death was inevitable. But creating distance made me feel guilty. Was it not wrong to feel anything less than all the sadness I...