Attachment Unavailable…

So, did you see the above picture carefully? I’m sure most of you smiled. But I guess without even the monk telling us, we are all following his message very skillfully. I know it is THE 21st century. We all have our own professional horizons to be achieved. We all want to be rich, relaxed and live a king size life. We all have a dream of buying an Audi and a sea faced house. But what is all this making us into? ROBOTS may be.

A decade or two back, human beings had limited dreams, limited resources and a lot more family members and friends who let them live their lives as humans. During that time the attachments were totally available I must say. Married couples or unmarried for that matter indulged more into discussions, emotions, sharing, caring for each other; unlike today. Presently the couples look forward to getting into relationships in order to be ‘cool’ in front of their peers or just because it’s a societal norm. The love and relationship is considered ‘rocking’ only if they take selfies, giving expensive surprises, click intimate photos and constantly go out for dinners and parties. However if they sit and have an intense talk or believe in a deep emotional connection or commit to each other till eternity, its perceived as ‘Cheesy and old fashioned’.  This applies even to married couples. Presently the attachments tend to be unavailable, not only on our emails but also in our personal lives (which may not really be personal and are just the FB updates). We tend to click a photo with our family in order to put up on the social media with a caption ‘family time’. Well this could be because we are always ‘busy at work’ or ‘pretend to be occupied in our work’ and don’t really have the time or interest to be really involved or invest in things like attachment or emotional connections.

However, I’m not blaming anyone for being too passionate about their professions, nor about having a lot of dreams to be achieved. But the only point is, while we strive for our materialistic advances, are we losing on the most important and pleasuresome trait of ours as humans? The attachment? An emotional bond? May be! It’s like we want to send an email, but always forget to attach the files. Putting it in other words, we do want people to be our friends or want to be in good books of others but without the strings attached. This is not only about the love relationships, but also the emotional bond between friends, family members (especially parents), teachers, cousins, house-maids, and every other relationship. We don’t need to be emotionally close to everyone, but you can at least feel attached to your parents and siblings? Well I guess I’m talking about something which seems unrealistic for today’s generation.  Girls (not all of them) today, when look for probable husbands and meet guys for marriage often ask: ‘how much of old furniture do you have at home? In the sense ‘how many old people do you have at your home for which I have to be responsible?’ This seems bizarre; isn’t it? But believe me I have friends who have actually got into these really absurd conversations while they were looking for probable brides.

In the process of gender equality, while competing with each other at all fronts, both young mothers and fathers, seem to have forgotten about what efforts both their parents took to raise them together, and how much time did they invest in them while rearing the little ones.  But currently, even the parent-child bond just tends to be limited to meeting after office hours, may be during one of the meals, or while going for movies and malls. Children seem to be more attached to the teachers, baby sitters and counselors in schools than to their parents. Having grandparents at home is like the rarest thing. I would say it’s a luxury that’s hard to get. How materialistic have we become? Why do we compete so much? For what? For just a good lifestyle? Which means having a big house, a big car, and a healthy bank balance? Aan haan…then we surely have become robots…It may be the need of an hour for this century…but then who decides the need?


Having said that it could also be that maybe we are not getting involved in human bonds because we fear losing people, dyeing alone or we just don’t give a damn about all the ‘emotional drama’ as we may call it today.  Here I really envy people on the traffic signals or may be people living in orphanages, old age homes etc. who have a gang of their own. They love each other; they care for each other, live together and stay happy. They surely don’t have the lifestyles that we are looking for, but they have the most important thing in their life-emails…that’s the attachment and so they are HAPPY (unless happiness means a big house for them)

Well folks, I’m not trying to discourage anyone or I’m not saying that we should not strive for better lifestyles. Of course we should and we should also look for our professional growth in terms of greater knowledge, position and growing bank balance. But I just want us all to be careful about- at the cost of WHAT?????

Think about it. Let’s take some efforts to live life like living beings and not like automatons working mechanically (No offense to anyone who wants to live like that). Let’s create a world where everyone is not just cognitively intelligent but also emotionally and socially intelligent. Let’s connect not only with ourselves, our family and friends but also to unknown people and the so called ‘Not so privileged ones’. Let’s build a community that not only connects but also empathizes with each other. Believe me we would be far happier and motivated than what we are today.

Well if you find no such place on earth, SNEH could be your one stop shop for sure! Looking forward for new connections and even old ones along with attachment but of course!

                         –Shraddha Deo

Comments

  1. I agree with most of the points. Yes people are not able to draw a line between desires and price paid for this. Success comes with a price, are you ready to pay but you will have to decide what is the line.

    Balance between desires and happiness, love, affection is very imp.

  2. Beautifully written. Yes, I do agree that we don’t have attachments anywhere. We are planning for those things which are not even sure to come to us on the cost of loosing that what we have! I would rather say that the planning for a better lifestyle for family is ‘an Egoist’ formation as we don’t have loving families (including friends, families, cousins and all near and dear one’s) close by at all.

    The good Balance would be a key to overcome this.

  3. A very well written piece trying to portray today’s generation of being trendy and cool. Still hardly able to understand why people are so busy trying to impress things which hardly mattered then. It’s surely about the status in the society or maybe the society’s interpretation have changed to make people adapt themselves to the newer thoughts.

    I can hardly think of my childhood days which were anti social or not spending most of the time interacting with the people around.

    Main problem arising is improper use of the technology which is making our parts and satisfying ourselves with the limited virtual world. For me the only solution would be the strong grooming right from the childhood which would be highly fundamental.

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