Ryan Gosling, SRK & Boy No 37

Collective conscious – For the lesser informed, collective conscious is basically a shared set of beliefs, morals & attitude. For the more informed, my question is, how did it get formed? 

 

All through life I have always been that person who asks a ton of questions. Yes, I’m that annoying person. Otherwise also called genius. And this one question has always bothered me from the moment I learnt this phrase. 

 

My best guess to the answer is that a bunch of people felt a certain way and some more aware people gave it a name and a whole bunch of insecure people in power made it a norm. But that’s just my deduction.

 

For the record, I am no psychologist. I only studied elementary psychology. That also in grade 11 & 12 which means I studied squat of psychology. I didn’t get that far in medicine either. Yes, I also studied medicine for a bit. And yes, I’m showing off now. 

 

These disclaimers are just so you don’t question your life and life’s choices based on mine. But considering you are sitting here reading my blog, I can very well say that you are making rather good choices already. 

 

Coming back to collective conscious and my reasons for questioning it is very simple. I fell in love with Shah Rukh Khan. (Ryan Gosling, if you ever read this, please understand I fell in love with you a tad bit later in life and it’s way more real than this. I mean you and I are the real thing!) Yeah ok, you can now decide to drop my page and go back to your Instagram. This rest of this blog is going to get hectic! 

"You read a few things and you think you know it all. But until you kayak for some hours in ice-freezing water to get a cup of hot coffee in the middle of nowhere, how exactly do you know what that feels like? You don't." So don't tell me feelings don't matter. It's probably the only thing that does matter. 

No, it was not after DDLJ or Kuch Kuch Hota Hai that I fell in love with him. Just generally and sometime along in life, I fell in love with love. And Mr. Khan in my days was the walking – talking human form of love. Atleast in my head.  

 

But here is where things got really interesting because along with me a whole generation of people fell in love with him. I doubt they will admit it without 6 pints of beer in their system but they did. As for me, along with Mr. Khan I fell in love with a lot of boys. Not together (thank god!).  

 

As wonderful as that was, I was thoroughly confused. My 16-year-old brain couldn’t understand how I was falling for SRK and some other boy together with the very same intensity. Oh my love was real. Rock solid real for both together. And then the problems began. A few weeks later I continued to be in love with SRK but the boy, not so much. No offense to the boy, he was really nice. But come on. It’s not that easy to compete with SRK. 

 

And barely a few days after falling out of love with (for the lack of a better way of putting it) Boy No 1, I started falling in love with boy No 2. 

 

You see how confusing it got for a 16-year-old?

 

By the time I hit Boy No 21, I was exhausted with confusion. Yeah, I read Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Enid Blyton and Sweet Valley University but nothing was explaining what was going on with me. None of those people were hitting Boy No 21 with the same intensity as my love for SRK and Boy No 2 together. Now I know better to never read Sweet Valley University or stop my un-conceived child from reading it but hey, where do you look for these answers? 

 

I swear to god, if any of you say – your mother, I will hurt you. I envy you for the bond you share with your mother if you managed to take this kind of troubles to her with honesty. Because if I turned to my mother for this, she would probably take me to a tantric to dust the love and lust out of me with peacock feathers and a truck load of loban (I don’t know the English word for loban!). 

 

At that time, I didn’t have Dr. Jehangir Khan to explain it to me so I turned to Jennifer Aniston and Meg Ryan. But nope. They didn’t help. Not a bit. They always got a hunk after everything and my story was just not progressing that way. I on the other hand was dropping off hunks after hunks like bread crumbs. 

 

I am not sounding like a very nice person now, am I? Wait for it. Good things come with time!

 

Years kept going by and forget what anyone else thought, I myself thought I was insane. At some point I just settled down for maybe I am just a very large hearted person (which I am :) ). I can love a lot of people at the same time. My love for SRK grew and then I met Boy No 33 and I discovered Ryan Gosling. I am not kidding, I loved them all through heaven and hell and back. 

 

You know, I am actually so damn proud of my younger self that I didn’t settle. Because can you imagine what I would do to some wonderful person and his family if I did? 

 

The problem is, I just couldn’t arrive then at turning the question the other way around. 

 

You and I are speaking out today. But ask my grandmother and yours. If you are engaged to someone and you are attracted to someone else who is not your fiancé, would she approve of your feeling? Mine would make an Anarkali wall for me with me in it. To her, you are some dangerous words. Infidel. Adulteress. Evil even. 

 

Oh lord. Who said so? Society. Which is what exactly? Collective conscious? Does that not grow with time? Is the collective still as old as my humble grandmother today? Are we still warding off evil with skeleton heads and lizard tail bits? 

 

This is where things get really tricky and hypocrisy kicks in. 

 

In work when one defies the highest of standards to give an even higher standard, or cuts across their bosses to show some serious mettle, he or she becomes a millionaire or these days, a billionaire. They are given laurels & called ambitious. 

 

In personal life however, if one defies the lowest standards of morals and experiences happiness, its called infidelity or many other such words that usually always has a negative connotation.

 

Let me ask you a simple question. You possibly laughed at my falling in love with SRK sentiment. Why? He is married. He has kids. Is that ok with the “collective conscious?” 

Would you laugh if I told you Boy No 37 is Arjun, my next door hunk of a neighbor with a beautiful wife and a lovely daughter. For cuteness factor, let me also just throw in an adorable beagle. 

 

I doubt it. 

 

Relax. Arjun is hypothetical. Since I was bored with real men, I started creating imaginary ones and falling in love with them for the purpose of this post! 

 

But there is serious question in all of this. I feel things. It’s not voluntary. But it’s very real. My wonderful evil spirit chasing mother taught me well. I do know when I should and when I shouldn’t act on a feeling but what’s stopping me from accepting what I feel? Collective conscious? Screw that. 

 

Sometimes there is something beautiful in not getting what you want. There is more learning in experiences than in fear. But denying your mind an honest feeling – now that’s just poppycock. (Finally I got to use this word!)  

 

I am sure at some point of time in your life, you have walked across a beautiful river or lake in the middle of the night. You probably even argued with your brain in trying to decide whether to jump in it or not. Jumping was the decision. Some of you did, some didn’t but you did admit that it was rather tempting to jump right? So where is the rationale in the feeling then? Well I did quiet a few times. One night I didn’t see the mud so I crankily got home and washed my hair for 40 hours and clearly I don’t learn from my mistakes all that fast so on another night at another place, I did it again. But this time I had the coldest but the most beautiful kiss ever with a lit bridge in the distance, a sky full of stars and that experience will never get replicated. Even if I tried.  

 

So why do you want to deny yourself the peace and calm of being in sync with your own feelings? So what if you have a crush on Arjun? As long as you don’t tell my mother about it, I think you should be fine. 

I am not saying go for it and get Arjun. All I am saying is, tell yourself “I’m screwed, I am crushing on a married guy”. It’ll take you sometime and you will get over it but while you are going through it, you will experience some happy, sad and funny feelings that you will learn to cherish but most of all, you will be composed. As opposed to crush the feeling all together, question yourself about being many things that according to my mother only skeleton worshiping thugs can ward off and throw those feelings somewhere in your sub-conscious, shut the door every time you see Arjun and pretend to the world that you are all fine. How exactly does the latter help? 

 

Fifty percent of you is what you feel and the other fifty percent is what you do about what you feel. The former is not in your control so don’t waste time trying to control it. The later is. Put the energy here. 

 

Every time you want to break a border, there will always be something that doesn’t want you to break it. Or someone on the other side who will not want you to cross it. 

I’m not just taking about relations. I’m talking about life and every aspect of it. 

Who really made these borders and boundaries? I’m sure it’s not god. It has to be human. 

 

Because the other question is, has someone carved a border in your head saying your feeling is crossing a line? 

Well, that person lied. 

 

Life’s too short to pretend. Tell it like it is and move on.

Ryan Gosling, are you reading yet? 

Picture Courtesy : Nitin Parmar

Date : 19.04.2021